Read the interview Transcript with hosts Natali and Clayton Morris “My jaw is on the floor!”
HOST: Did President Trump’s offer to send U.S. troops to Mexico to fight the drug cartels? Now, what is this about? Because nobody really believes that Mexico’s got this. They clearly don’t have a handle on cartel violence. The cartel is well embedded into the Mexican government. So why would they not want this? Is it just as simple as they can’t fight the cartel? Or do they know that the U.S. track record of getting involved in foreign conflicts is not good? Both things are valid, right? Todd Bensman is from the Center for Immigration Studies, and he joins us to explain this. Thank you so much for joining us. Why do you think that the Mexican government is posturing so much that they don’t need the U.S. military?
BENSMAN: Because Mexico’s long, in their view, sorry history with U.S. military interventions that has kind of permeated the basic political culture of the country. You know, the big bad gringos coming in here with military, you know, punitive expeditions, you know, lots of bad history wars all the way to Monterey, Mexico. And this is, to this day, a very sensitive topic for Mexico when it comes to their domestic politics. The problem is, for them, is that now they’ve got Donald Trump to contend with, and Trump is rattling the sabers. And he’s not just rattling the sabers, he’s got a lot of sabers all around the
country now. He spent the first three months just setting the table. for US military intervention, unilateral military intervention. He wants the fentanyl stopped. He wants that all shut down. He wants the Mexican drug cartels severely wounded, if not mortally wounded. He wants to strike at them. And he probably realizes that the Mexican government is in bed with the Mexican cartels and always has been
in bed with the Mexican cartels. To the extent that the Mexican military has ever done much of anything,
especially in any kind of recent years, the last 15 years, it’s kind of dog and pony show stuff. It’s hugs, not bullets was actually the name of their official policy. I’m not making that up. That’s their name. Hugs, not bullets. And Trump wants to make it bullets, not hugs. And he’s made that clear. And if they don’t make it bullets, not hugs. for real, I think Trump will actually strike militarily and unilaterally at those cartels. I think he wants to. I think he’s aching to do it.
HOST: Well, let me just go on record in saying, you know, because there’s a lot of y’all, I don’t know where you come down on this, and I’m not calling you this at all, but there’s a lot of warmongers
and neocons and nutjobs that I can’t stand who are pushing us, want to go to war with Russia. They want us to go to war with Iran. I don’t have any tolerance for those people. However, this is, to me, the greatest threat to the United States. Right here, right now, right on our border is what these cartels are doing and the cartel. violence that’s poured into the United States of America. This is a clear and
present danger. Colonel McGregor has said it, get our troops out of the Mideast, put them on our U.S. border, get them here to protect the United States of America. And President Trump has said that U.S., that Mexico has to be doing more. To combat these gangs. cartels. Otherwise, we’re going to step in. Are
they doing more to stop the drugs in the cartels?
BENSMAN: Well, in fairness, they are. The Mexicans have actually gone kinetic against the cartels.
and the fentanyl-producing hubs, primarily in Culiacan, which is Sinaloa State. Down there, you can look it up on Google. That’s where most of the fentanyl got produced and is shipped into the United States over the borders. Well, Trump said 25 percent tariffs unless you put a stop to that. And it has been nonstop raiding and arresting, blowing stuff up, dismantling labs all over Culiacan. And the fentanyl seizures coming across the U.S. with more troops, with more border patrol available to them. look for it and interdict it is down 50% from where it was at this same period of time last year. So it appears as though they’re having some effect. Now, I interviewed recently Derek Maltz, who’s the acting head of DEA, had him on the phone and I asked him what was going on down there. And he said, well, the cartels have decided that fentanyl is just too hot of a product and they have made a strategic business decision because of the pressure Trump is putting on to stop trafficking it over the U.S. border and to send it to Europe instead. So we’ll see if that actually turns out to be the case. They’re still picking up fentanyl. We’re still finding it. There’s still stuff coming over the border. But, you know, the Trump pressure campaign on Mexico, even in light of that, even in light of the… The Mexican effort to shut down the illegal immigration on their side of the border, it’s still not enough. That’s why I say I think Trump may be aching to go unilateral here. One quick thing, well, I don’t know how quick it is, but, you know, when I say the administration is setting the table for something, what I mean by that is that they are doing unprecedented numbers of spy flights over Mexico, which means they are mapping targets.
They have shifted CIA personnel from Ukraine and the Middle East into Mexico to do counter-narcotics work. They have put three destroyers off the coast of the Pacific in the lanes for Mexico in international waters with Coast Guard. Uh…contingents aboard that can pop off on dinghies and zoom over and do
operations. They have put warships also on the Gulf of America. They have put the 10th Mountain Division, which is just a badass unit, storied unit in Arizona and New Mexico. And they put striker brigades, those big eight-wheeled, you know, 15-ton monstrosities loaded with all kinds of weaponry, machine guns and surveillance technology and everything else in Texas, New Mexico, and everywhere else. So it looks like if Trump administration, which, by the way, has been reported in the Washington Post as saying that they are having meetings about unilaterally doing drone strikes against the cartels in Mexico with or without Mexican knowledge or assistance, all of that armor and hardware. Bracketing Mexico will be there in case they try to strike back. This is huge. I just want to clarify.
HOST: My jaw’s on the floor. Yeah, I mean, you’re breaking some big news here, Todd. And I think arguably no one knows more about this than you. So you’re saying that a lot of the CIA that were focused on Ukraine have been repositioned in Mexico now, carrying out spy flights, identifying cartel targets, basically ready to go. So everything is lined up and ready to go. Did I hear you correctly? And if you think about, if I can just piggyback that question, think about what we need to go to war with
Afghanistan. We need allies in and around that region so we can launch from those places. We would not have to do that, if, in fact, there is a path forward, to going to war with the cartels. That’s wild.
BENSMAN: Yeah, and by the way, this isn’t, I’m not getting this from, secret sources or anything. I’m just following the public dots that are already out there. You know, it was the Washington Post that reported about the transfer of CIA officers from other regions into Mexico. It’s been the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reporting about the spy flights, the striker brigades. That’s all. You can
read all about that in the Stars and Stripes and Military Times. It’s all out there. But it’s unprecedented, the things that they’re doing. I mean, these are hardcore light infantry ground units that they’re deploying to a border that has no illegal immigrants crossing right now. And people are starting to say, well, why are you doing that? There’s no illegal immigrants crossing. And the answer is silence. And I can read into the silence about why they’re putting these. Heavy duty milk. combat units on our border, and it’s to deter retaliation against whatever they’ve got going. That’s my guess. That’s a speculative guess.
HOST: I heard about these spy flights. I had missed that CIA in that Washington Post piece had been repositioned from Ukraine to carry this out. I guess, Todd, we’ll get you out of here on this. You talked a little bit about how it’s been affecting right now in the United States on the fentanyl side. How many border crossings? We hear the numbers from the Trump administration on border crossings, and let’s include Canada in this mix as well. What is your assessment of where things stand right now? Illegals coming into the United States. We had to stop the bleeding. Has the bleeding stopped?
BENSMAN: Yes, the bleeding has stopped. The mass migration crisis of the last four years is over, and I officially declared that in a column back in January. After going down there, and I’ve been down there on both sides of the border twice since Trump came into office, it’s over, folks. It just ended in about an hour. It took about one hour, not a big Senate bill. It just took a will to use the existing tools provided by Congress in statute in the law, which is detain and deport everybody that you catch. It’s that simple. Stop letting everybody in. It was that simple. They turned the switch.
Now, we still have about 250 to 300-day crossing border-wide, but that… That compares to 14,000 a day at the height of this thing, and 8, 9, 10, 12,000 a day for months and months and years and years. So, and all of those, mostly, most of all of those were allowed in. But the $250 to $300 a day we’re getting now are all being returned. I saw Homan or somebody recently went public and said we did release nine. They released nine. I’d like to know why they released even those nine. They kind of got my curiosity, like, okay, you released nine. Like, what’s special about those nine? Remind me to look into that. But, like, nine.
HOST: I have that somewhere. It was like, I can’t remember. I can find it in my notes. Go ahead. I remember that nine number from recent.
BENSMAN: Yeah. If you’re not letting anyone in and you’re catching everybody, and by the way, they’re not only catching and they’re not only hunting, aggressively hunting them and detaining and deporting them. They’re also referring thousands of those that they catch for prosecution, federal prosecution. This is not very widely known. This. part of what the Trump administration is doing. Under INA 1325 and 1326, these are prosecutions in the criminal federal criminal courts that can get a first time offender about six months in prison. But if you do it again, it’s a 1326 and you can get up to 20 years, especially if you have any sort of criminal history on you. So you could get 10 years, you could get a lot of prison time if you’re crossing and they’re doing that and then they serve their time and then they send them home. Well, that kind of activity on this side spreads all around the world and nobody wants to spend the smuggling money to get that. That’s that’s what they get a jail term or else a deportation and they’re
broke and in debt. That’s the whole game right there. And that’s why the numbers are ridiculously low. And by the way, one last thing that there is this very dangerous category called gotaways. You probably have heard about it. During the Biden administration, 2.4 million, at least, that’s an undercount, got
away into the interior. Nobody ever laid hands on them. They just got a picture of them from a blimp or a game camera or something, or somebody spotted their footprints and they get counted. So it’s probably an undercount. Well, today it looks like the number, we have whole days and weeks that go by without a
single gotaway, no runners at all.
And it’s a high concentration of criminal aliens that would want to run into the country and try to escape and get away. They usually have to pay smugglers a lot of money to do that. Well, the smuggling fees have just gone through the roof because the risk against the smugglers who all get prosecuted under to the highest nth of the law. law that we can prosecute them for don’t want to smuggle them in anymore it’s not worth it. so they’re hiking their prices to make up for the risk and nobody can afford the prices except the richest of the rich so there you go it’s like well every category is just doing really great.
HOST: All right I found it in my notes those nine… eight of them were material witnesses in criminal cases there you go and one was a medical emergency yeah i found it sorry it was bothering me because I had just looked into this and it was in early April that he said that you’re right do you have another question?
HOST: No, I was just going to make a statement thank Todd um my point is that what you just said there at the end underscores how this was treason by the biden administration i mean you write about it in your book overrun that this was calculated the fact that in with what what trump’s able to do in just a short amount of time shows you that it was criminal negligence on the part of the in the Biden administration… But beyond that, it was intentional and it was brought to bring America to its knees. All of the things you just labeled there, you cut off their money, you cut off their supply, you make it incredibly dangerous for them to do it, and you stop the bleeding, and you could do it within a few weeks, and the Biden administration chose not to do it. They did the opposite.
BENSMAN: Right, and they bamboozled the American public about, uou know, we just, there’s just an inevitability about this. We just can’t do anything. We’re powerless against it. We need a big Senate bill. If only Trump hadn’t killed that Senate bill. Remember all that? You know, we need comprehensive immigration reform. We have a broken immigration system we’ve got to fix. All of the root causes, we’ve got to rebuild the nations of Central America so they don’t want to come here anymore after 30 years. A big Marshal Plan or something. Right. All of that is just exposed, absolutely, with brilliant white light, sunlight, as total BS. None of that was ever true. The only thing that stands unscathed is this policy of catch, detain, deport. End of story.
HOST: Yeah, now it’s happening to Europe. So the delusion, and now you tell us fentanyl is going to Europe. This is going to be a bad, bad situation for the Europeans. Todd, great to see you. Thank you so
much for your expertise on this. Really fascinating. Thank you for having me. And thank you for your great work as well.
END
About Natali and Clayton Morris: Clayton Morris is a former FOX News anchor. Natali Morris is a former anchor and reporter for MSNBC, CNBC and CBS News. On Redacted, the married couple (not brother and sister!) and former mainstream news professionals take an in-depth look at the news the mainstream media largely ignores. They explore the legal, social, financial, and personal issues that matter to you. They want to set the record straight and bring you the stories nobody else tells. Along with the facts and the complete picture, Redacted offers real-world analysis without an agency driven by corporate overloads. With Clayton’s extensive journalism experience, he isn’t afraid to demand the truth from authorities. Redacted is an independent platform, unencumbered by external factors or restrictive policies, on which Clayton and Natali Morris bring you quality information, balanced reporting, constructive debate, and thoughtful narratives.