Kate Delaney: Todd has just returned from the Texas-Mexico border where he found a section of border the Biden administration has left pretty undefended. Tell me what you found. What did you see, first of all when you arrived, and what were you expecting?
Bensman: Most of the reporting on the border crisis has been happening in the southern tip of Texas – McAllen… they call it the Rio Grande Valley sector of Texas. That’s where all the families are coming through, the underage minors, the teens, and the children coming through. That’s what’s gotten a lot of the publicity and interest but what I noticed in the CBP apprehension data was that there’s this big spike in adult immigrants in the Big Bend Sector, so I went to go see what that was all about. Big Bend is a very remote rugged wilderness area that historically is so harsh that relatively few immigrants even go through there because you have to backpack for days on end. But we’ve seen a 365 percent increase in single adults coming through there. So what I immediately noticed was that ranchers and Border Patrol agents and people who live there tell me they’ve never seen anything like this before. The border crisis has definitely arrived in this completely out of the way corner of the border, and nobody knows about it. The way it works is that there is a drug cartel called La Linea on the Mexican side that has discovered what they call “la invitacion,” the invitation. The invitation that they refer to – I interviewed a cartel smuggler on the Mexican side – is Joe Biden and his promises and policies about welcoming illegal immigrants in, so they are coming in response. So La Linea figured out that if they go down and recruit these immigrants – it’s basically a sales force – that they can very easily gather up thousands of immigrants willing to pay $11,000 and $12,000 a head to make these five, six, seven and eight day backpacking journeys through the wilderness of the Big Bend area. In large groups. You know, they’ve always had illegal immigration through there, largely Mexican nationals looking for a job and there might be two or three here and there. But now, you’re having groups of a hundred and 150 just pushing through ranches and homes and cutting fences and making their way through to Interstate-10, which could be as much as a hundred miles inland. They get to Interstate-10 and a cartel associate picks them up on the side of the road and takes them into the American interior.