In a series of written and video reports from both sides from the US-Mexico border during 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 Todd Bensman explores the causes and consequences of the mass-migration crisis he predicted in a November 2020 column titled “Will We See a ‘Biden Effect’ at the Border?” The crisis began several months before the national presidential election, when aspiring immigrants bet that Joe Biden would win and open the border to them. That’s just what happened, and the crisis quickly escalated after Biden took office. This ongoing series reflect conditions on both sides of the border. Dispatches cover from the Rio Suchiate border between Guatemala and Mexico to the El Paso, Big Bend, Rio Grande Valley, and Del Rio Border Patrol Sectors of Texas during the Biden first year in office to present. Reporting was done from Guatemala, Mexico’s most southern city of Tapachula, as well as northern cities of Monterrey, Juarez, Acuna, Piedras Negras, Ojinaga, La Poveneir, Reynosa, Tijuana, Mexicali, and Monterrey as well as in small towns and villages too countless to list.
At the Darien Gap – Colombia/Panama August 6-19, 2024
Has Panama Closed the Notorious ‘Darien Gap Mass Migration Route to U.S. Border? An assessment from the field in Colombia and Panama
The purpose of this report is to assess early progress of President Mulino’s highly consequential closure initiative, to chart its direction, provide a medium-term prognosis, and identify challenges to achieving Panamanian goals that might improve current U.S. border security and immigration-control management. This report is based on first-hand field research conducted from August 6-18, 2024, on both sides of the Darien Gap, which in Colombia encompasses migration trail entry points around the Gulf of Uraba and in Panama trail exits in Darien Province and Embera tribal reservation lands. This report is based on direct observation and interviews with migrants, residents, United Nations officials, smugglers, non-governmental organization personnel, area residents, and top Panamanian officials.
Dispatch from Colombia: South American ally permits mass migration; Biden/Harris look away
Perhaps my most important finding was that there was no evidence of Colombian interdiction in the smooth-running Gaitanista human smuggling machine. Instead, I discovered a wide-open marriage between the Gaitanistas and local, state, and federal Colombian government agencies, the United Nations, and non-governmental migrant help groups, altogether engaged in the most productive, functionally well-oiled, and industrialized human smuggling assembly line operation anywhere on the planet.
VIDEO: Colombia Chaos: In the thick of the notorious Darian Gap migrant trails – off the grid Acandi
Bensman in Colombia on the hidden trails of the Darien Gap, August 2034
Exclusive: Panama Border Security Chief Says Many U.S.-Bound Terror Suspects Caught in Darien Gap
New official information about terrorism suspects interrupted on their way to the American border comes by way of an exclusive Center for Immigration Studies interview with the chief of Panama’s National Border Service (SENAFRONT), Director General Jorge Gabea, at agency headquarters just off the Panama Canal. Asked to comment about SENAFRONT’s reported August arrest of three Afghan terror suspects whose biometrics were taken and checked at a Darien Province immigrant reception station (described in the SENAFRONT tweet below), Gabea responded that the report was “not fake. We did take and profile a few members of a terrorist cell from … Afghanistan,” he said. “We linked and we profiled them to be members of an active cell. They were members of a Salafist group, and they had links with different activities.” But then Gabea added that this was far from a one-off. “We have many stories of that. We don’t just have one. We have many stories of that, from Somalia, from Yemen … from Syria, from Africa.”
VIDEO: A Ride on Panama’s Wild Side
While reporting on Colombia-Panama’s notorious “Daien Gap” in August, Todd Bensman traveled by motorized paranga boat up a river for three hours to see a village hub for mass migration exiting the notorious Darien Gap
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VIDEO: How Panama Processes US-Bound Illegal Immigrants in Remote Jungle Embera Indian Village
The Embera native village of Bajo Chiquito has become a major transit hub for illegal immigrants moving from Darien Gap to Panaman
NY Post: Five Chiefs of Forsaken Tribe in Panama’s Notorious ‘Darien Gap’ Migrant Passage Slam Biden/Harris, UN, and Immigrant Advocates ‘You are Finishing Us!’
METETI, Panama — Not far from this small town, the 19,000-mile-long Pan-American Highway ends at a wall of jungle — the Darien Gap, a notorious wilderness that stretches from Colombia into Panama.
In just three years, 1.5 million migrants — lured by the Biden-Harris administration’s open border — have braved the footpaths of this jungle on their way north. Rather that stop this dangerous flow, the White House has encouraged it. Top cabinet officials such as DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, State Department Secretary Antony Blinken have repeatedly come to Panama to press for “safe, orderly, and humane” transit for migrants. The Biden-Harris administration lavished millions in tax money on United Nations agencies and non-governmental advocacy groups (NGOs) that descended on this region to ease the burdens of Darien Gap travel. In the process, they have trampled arguably the most vulnerable and important stakeholder of them all in Panama: the Embera-Wounnaan tribe, whose 19,000 people happened to be living smack in the middle of this immigration hurricane.
The Daily Wire: Biden-Harris Mass Migration Is ‘Killing All The Indians in Panama’
METETI, Panama – The 19,000-strong indigenous Embera-Wounaan tribe resides far beyond the reach of American pollsters who regularly log high voter disapproval of the three-plus years of illegal mass migration over the U.S. Southwest Border.
But if anyone ever sought Embera opinion about distant U.S. border policy – and, almost incredibly, I may be the only one who ever has – they’d get an ear full.
VIDEO: A United Nations of Mass Migration
Encounters with a multinational diversity of immigrants crossing the Colombia-Panama Darien Gap, August 2024 Todd Bensman for the Center for Immigration Studies
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NY Post: Dems Abandon Wide-Open Gap
PANAMA CITY — On July 1, Panama’s new President José Raúl Mulino took office on an unprecedented promise to close a major route of illegal immigration — through which at least 1.5 million foreign nationals have poured through since 2021. Mulino said he would close the infamous Darién Gap, a 70-mile roadless jungle wilderness that South American migrants traverse on their way north to the United States. He secured a promise from the Biden-Harris administration to help accomplish this: money and possibly even planes to carry illegally arriving migrants back to their countries. But nearly two months after the US pledged a “removal flights program” to support Panama, the aid is nowhere to be found and the immigrants, after sheltering in place at home or in Colombia to see if Panama might actually deport people, are starting to flow once again through the Darién Gap. “We’re waiting,” said a senior Panama government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the topic. “We are [ready] to do our part of the agreement but we need the resources. We don’t have the airplanes to move the big numbers we need to.”
VIDEO: What Mass Migration Looks Like in Slow Motion – from the Darien Gap
Panga boats ferry U.S.-bound migrants out of the Darien Gap by the thousands. Subscribe to Bensman’s YouTube channel
VIDEO NEXT STOP: Why Bensman is Going to The Darien Gap of Colombia-Panama
CIS analyst Todd Bensman completed field research August 6-18, 2024 about the Darien Gap immigration passageway through which more than 1.5 million foreign nationals have reached the U.S. southern border over the past three-plus years. At the link above, you can find X Tweets Bensman posted of video and photos from the ground. Here you can also find Bensman’s published reports. Bensman’s purpose for traveling first to Colombia’s immigrant staging towns and then to Panama’s camps and impacted villages was to assess the impacts of a new Panama plan to “close” the passageway – supposedly with pledged U.S. help.
DARIEN MEDIA
In War Room from Panama’s National Assembly: Democrats National Security Crisis: U.S. Fails to Seize Opportunity in Darien Gap Standoff
El Conservador Radio Show: Todd Bensman Reports on U.S. Failure to Help Panama Stop Illegal Immigration
Fox News Digital: Says Expert [Bensman] Biden-Harris border policies wreak havoc on indigenous tribe, ‘Pushed aside and destroyed’
Indigenous Chiefs Blame Democrat Border Policies for Cultural Devastation-Bensman’s Scandalous WarRoom Report
Juarez and Chihuahua State, Mexico – April 2024
Daily Mail Cartel Secrets: Inside Mexican Gang Territory, Bensman’s report of how pedophiles and killers pay cartel smugglers to sneak them across the border
Hit the gas!’ I barked at my translator behind the wheel of our tiny rental car. ‘Let’s get the f*** out of here!’ We tore off – and left the reflections of two cartel men shrinking in our rearview mirror. Reporting on the ground in northern Mexico comes with certain risks and chief among them is unexpectedly coming face-to-face with gunmen. I’d come to La Linea Cartel territory, a vast high desert region west of Ciudad Juárez, to document a part of the migrant crisis that few ever see: the smuggling of dangerous criminals into America.Juárez is a crime-ravaged city at the junction of the New Mexico, Texas and Mexico borders. Over the past three years, tens of thousands of migrants have traveled here to willingly turn themselves over to U.S. Border Patrol agents outside of El Paso, Texas. These migrants hope to join the many millions, who’ve been processed and released into the U.S. on the sole condition that they eventually produce a legitimate reason for being in the country. But a few miles west of Juárez, it’s a different story
Video: Welding the Border Shut
During a clandestine trip into La Linea Cartel controlled turf west of Juarez, Bensman came across a welder on the New Mexico side of a border wall who was repairing smuggling holes. The ensuing interview revealed a startling set of facts, including this one: government contractors are never able to work themselves out of a job no matter how many holes a day they refill.
Video: An Epidemic of Runners from Juarez into New Mexico
Thousands of ‘runners’ are pouring into New Mexico from an area west of Juarez totally controlled by La Linea Cartel.
Texas Versus The Wire Cutters
An ongoing battle takes place all day and night between Texas state police and National Guard and illegal immigrants determined to defeat state fortifications in Juarez, Mexico.
Video: Biden’s Mexico Crackdown
President Biden has cut a deal with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador to have Mexican troops and immigration officials help him defeat Trump on the mass migration crisis issue. Mexico is cracking down all across the Texas border now to reduce the terrible optics
Piedras Negras, Mexico; Eagle Pass, Texas and Kickapoo Nation, Texas – February 2024
Inside ‘Zone 47’: Biden’s Ruthless Mexico Immigration Crackdown is Working but Media Won’t Tie Him to It
PIEDRAS NEGRAS, MEXICO – Where just weeks ago, U.S.-bound immigrants were publicly ubiquitous all the time, the streets of Piedras Negras are now devoid of them, and only a few dozen a day attempt desperate clandestine crossings on new flanking paths that smugglers have blazed in the broader Eagle Pass area. Texas crossings are now far less than Arizona and California for the first time in the three-year-long historic crisis. After Biden and his chief lieutenants returned from mysterious diplomatic missions to Mexico City in late December with a still-secret deal in hand, Mexico’s central government mounted one of the most epic domestic anti-illegal immigration operations in recent memory. Some of the operations done at Biden’s behest have proven ruthless.
See a modified version of this story in The Daily Mail Online here AND Recent Sky-High Levels of Illegal Migration Are Dropping Fast — and Here’s Why
Will the Kickapoo Tribe Be Dragged Into The Abbott-Biden Fray Over Illegal Immigration?
KICKAPOO NATION, TEXAS – By now, anyone following President Joe Biden’s historic mass illegal immigration has heard about Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s battle with the administration over border fencing at the Eagle Pass region. The legal fight over concertina wire and anti-climb fencing threatens to spiral into a constitutional crisis. For now, neither side, including the illegal immigrants, appears to be making a move at the highly fortified Shelby Park area of Eagle Pass, ground zero in the fencing fight. But an almost perfect new route appears to have opened a dozen miles downstream on the Rio Grande to get immigrants around the Texans at Eagle Pass, sources close to the tribe tell me. This area is potentially a new floodgate that Abbott would be challenged to oppose but would greatly please open-border Democrats and political appointees.
Fronton Island and Roma, Texas – October 2023
Video Report: Texas Seizes Cartel Island in the Rio Grande in Risky First-of-a-Kind Operation
By force of arms, elite Texas Rangers occupy the largest cartel sanctuary island yet to deny its use for further marauding
The Texas seizure of Fronton Island, however, highlights a spin-off consequence that of the overall border crisis that went largely unnoted but demands equal attention: that when Border Patrol agents are busy processing in illegal immigrants for three years, the cartels go unchecked.
The Daily Mail: TODD BENSMAN’s dramatic eyewitness report on Texas’ invasion of a Mexican cartel island crawling with gang members and ringed with sniper nests… and it’s all happening INSIDE the U.S.
Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass – July 2023
Cold war breaks out between Texas Governor and Biden White House
A new video report highlights Texas Governor Abbott’s “Operation Hold the Line”, which has state police and National Guard block immigrants at the Rio Grande River’s edge, and President Biden’s undermining of the state’s efforts to enforce the laws.
Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies’ senior national security fellow, captures the border war, showing many of the initiatives undertaken by the state in and around Eagle Pass, Texas, a hot spot for illegal immigrant crossings. Bensman speaks with several illegal immigrants who successfully entered the country and with others who were discouraged and returned to Mexico. They told Bensman of their plans to go around the Texas border blockade and to search for U.S. Border Patrol officers, who the migrants feel are certain to admit them into the U.S. Bensman explains, “None of these immigrants are really giving up, because they all know full well there’s an antidote, a solution, to this Texas halt-and-block operation – it is President Joe Biden’s Border Patrol. The immigrants know that if they can bust the Texas blockade and link up with Biden’s Border Patrol agents, they will be escorted in right past Texas’s fortifications.”
Del Rio, Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass – June 2023
NY POST: Families are flooding US border following Title 42’s end — because Biden’s rules don’t apply to them
PIEDRAS NEGRAS – Parents in Mexico have discovered that administration threats of “expedited removals” for illegal crossings, five-year bans on legal reentry and prosecution do not apply to them. The runway into America is clear and open, just like always, to any parent with a kid. Immigrant families with children have now figured out that, if they cross illegally and turn themselves in under the supposedly harsh new strategy, Biden’s Border Patrol will very quickly admit all of them right into the American heartland just like when the government exempted them from Title 42. A mammoth new surge of family units seems assured because that good word is out and spreading lightning fast on cellphone social media networks.
Matamoros/Reynosa Mexico – May 2023
Video Updates: Mexican Border in Chaos as Title 42 Ends
MATAMOROS – CIS analyst Todd Bensman is live at the border in Matamoros and Reynosa, Mexico at a massive migrant camp. He has been watching thousands of migrants flooding into the U.S. all day; they are not waiting for the end of Title 42. Mexican immigration officials on the ground are powerless to do anything. See Bensman’s Twitter feed videos and timeline of Tweets from the field here.
New York Post: The Next Thing at the Border: Runners and Got-aways as Title 42 Ends
WEST OF JUAREZ – Although Americans won’t see this part of the ongoing mass-migration crisis, runners and gotaways are expected to be the next big thing at the southern border in the aftermath of Title 42’s end. “It’s going to be a dramatic increase, is what we’re expecting,” one senior Border Patrol official in the area told me. “We’re expecting huge increases in attempts to evade apprehension in the next couple of two or three weeks. There are too many holes in the dike and we’re running out of fingers.”
Biden DHS Coordinating Illegal Immigration In-Flows with Mexico
The Center for Immigration Studies asked several of the Mexican immigration officers what was going on and learned that President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has been coordinating these mass swims with Mexico’s immigration service, INM, at high levels on an encrypted Whatsapp channel. The officers explained that their senior officers were in touch with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials about how many immigrants were gathered and were prepared to cross the river at any given time. “We’re letting them know that there’s a group of people ready to cross,” one officer explained.
NY Post: I Witnessed Biden Officials Helping People Come into Country Illegally
A group of maybe 100 or 150 people would get up as though in response to a signal, and then there was a pause, followed in a little while by another group. So I asked the Mexican immigration officials on site what was going on, and they told me something shocking. They said their superiors were coordinating with US officials on when to let illegal immigrants cross the river. Biden’s DHS wanted to make sure they were finished “processing” a batch of migrants before the next batch came across, to make the whole process look less chaotic and newsworthy. To achieve that, they were collaborating with Mexican officials through an encrypted social media chatroom on when to allow the next group to cross. This goes beyond just acquiescing to illegal immigration — it’s facilitating it.
The Daily Mail: ‘The Door Is Open!’ One Cry Among 10,000 in a Mexican Border Town Where Migrants Are Ready to Risk the Rio Grande… Despite Warnings That Children May Drown
Armed only with hand-held radios, four uniformed Mexican immigration officers didn’t hear the pounding footsteps until it was too late. They were going to be overrun. A charging, screaming crowd of migrants, some carrying young children in their arms, stampeded down the bank of the Rio Grande River just outside of Matamoros, Mexico.
I watched as the immigration officers tried to hold back the mob, but it was pointless. When force failed, they tried reason.
Parsing Immigration podcast: 5/11: The End of Title 42
Summary
Title 42, the public-health rule that allows the Border Patrol to expel border-jumpers without a hearing, ends tonight at 11:59pm. It remains unclear how the Biden administration plans to enforce the border, which is already being flooded by migrants who are crossing by the thousands. Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Senior National Security Fellow, joins this episode of Parsing Immigration Policy from Matamoros, Mexico, located right across the U.S.-Mexico border from Brownsville, Texas. Bensman has interviewed migrants who have made their way to Matamoros from all over the world with plans to illegally cross into the U.S. Large encampments have formed in Matamoros, filled with migrants who are hoping to be able to enter the U.S. once Title 42 ends. As Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center and host of the podcast, puts it, these migrants are essentially “waiting for the first sign of weakness from this administration.”
Bensman explains that the infrastructure in place at our southern border to process migrants is already overwhelmed, and detention facilities at the border are already at 150 percent capacity. If the situation gets any worse, border officials won’t be able to hold them until their court date, and will begin using what the Biden administration calls “safe street releases”.
Interviews with Bensman at Matamoros, Mexico – Fox News and much more
Center for Immigration Studies’ Todd Bensman shares what he saw when he visited the border and discusses reports the Department of Homeland Security is working with Mexico to address the mass influx of migrants on ‘Fox & Friends.’
Juarez and Reynosa Mexico/Brownsville, McAllen Texas – April 2023
Video: U.S. Enabling Mass Asylum and Humanitarian Permit Fraud at the Southern Border
A new Center for Immigration Studies video report filmed in Mexico highlights the migrant numbers, nationalities, and reasons for crossing the southern border. A large number of Venezuelans, one of the largest populations presently entering the United States, are committing fraud to qualify for entry, as seen in the video. “Over the past two years, I have been interviewing Venezuelans in Mexico who are using the humanitarian claim to qualify for entry to the U.S. Many are committing fraud (a felony) – throwing away their documents and pretending they have just escaped their home country and political persecution when in fact they have been living safely and happily, and gainfully employed, in other countries in South America and the Caribbean for years.”
I met Venezuelans who are scamming the asylum system en masse to get into the US
All Venezuelans have been or will be let into America to stay on asylum or humanitarian claims that presume they are directly fleeing Venezuelan government persecution or face some other imminent danger back home. But that widespread narrative is largely a fable. Most Venezuelan border crossers have been living for years, safely, happily and prosperously in other countries. This fact means a massive fraud is underway as Venezuelans become a main feature of an expected mass rush on the border after the midnight May 11 demise of the pandemic-era Title 42 rapid-expulsion policy that has been holding some back.
In Reynosa, Mexico, 15,000 Haitian Immigrants Wait For New Chaotic Biden Policy To Kick In
Haitians gathered in Reynosa will be a bellwether to see how immigrants respond to the demise of Title 42 and Biden’s new plan
VIDEO: An Overwhelmed Border Patrol Is Missing an Epidemic of Runners and ‘Got-aways’
Border Patrol agents, equipped with sophisticated technology, attempt to apprehend migrants illegally crossing into the United States. But securing the border has become more difficult as agents are taken off the line to process unprecedented numbers of illegal migrants turning themselves in, instead of preventing smuggling, drug and human trafficking, and identifying national security threats. The end of Title 42 will push the numbers of migrants and got-aways even higher. Todd Bensman, the Center’s senior national security fellow, joins agents in New Mexico for a nighttime search for illegal migrants and warns of the got-away trends. Got-aways are unlawful border-crossers who are “directly or indirectly observed making an unlawful entry into the United States”, but who are not apprehended. Since the inauguration of President Biden, more than 1.5 million illegal migrants have been detected entering the country illegally, but have successfully evaded agents. And the monthly numbers continue to grow.
Video from Juarez: Biden’s CBP One Humanitarian/Work Permit Giveaway Program Is Collapsing
In January, the Biden administration rolled out its plan to address the chaos at the Southern border and discourage illegal entries. Under this new plan, would-be illegal crossers could obtain humanitarian admittance permits through the CBP One app before arriving at the border. Todd Bensman, the Center’s senior national security fellow, went down to Juarez, Mexico, and found that the system is failing. Migrants are instead abandoning the program and opting to cross illegally anyway.
Monterrey, Mexico – January 2023
The ‘Beast’ is Back: A Graphic Dispatch from the Mexican Trains Ferrying Thousands to America
MONTERREY, Mexico – Border Patrol has logged 4.5 million border apprehensions and another estimated 1.5 million undetected ‘gotaways’ since Biden’s January 2021 inauguration and lenient policies sparked all this off. Some significant but unknown percentage of this huge traffic is carried aboard unpoliced, easily accessible Mexican freight trains lined up in a vast depot and switching yard 30 miles north of Monterrey. It is here, amid a sprawling industrial suburbia of manufacturing plants and not far from a Hershey’s Chocolate plant, that some portion of hundreds of thousands of migrants finish their journeys to America aboard cargo trains. No one really knows how many participants in the Biden border crisis are arriving at the border by freight train. But Mexican media reporting, interviews with immigrants, people who work with them, and railway workers indicates La Bestia has been really roaring at full-throat the last couple of years.
United Nations to Hand Out Hundreds of Millions in Cash to U.S.-Bound Immigrants in 2023
MONTERREY, Mexico – The “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan” for 2023-2024, coordinated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), both of which receive substantial annual U.S. taxpayer contributions, calls for a quarter of the $1.72 billion it wants for 2023 — some $450 million — to go directly as cash or cash equivalents to “migrants and refugees” on the move throughout Latin America.
“Cash Working Groups” made up of more than 50 of the non-profit migrant advocate organizations will distribute the $450 million as “Cash and Voucher Assistance” or “Multipurpose Cash Assistance” to those paused outside their home countries and contemplating journeys or actually moving already along the migrant trails in 17 countries from South America through Central America and Mexico, the planning document reveals. These UN programs have proven controversial in Congress
The Mexican Backstory to Drone Images of Thousands Crossing – State Police Did the Smuggling
EL MORAL, Mexico – The flying cameras of Fox News shined a brilliant light on these arriving groups, stunned much of the public, spurred Republican lawmakers to voice outrage, and may well have contributed to President Joe Biden’s January decision to finally visit the border. But the Mexican side of the story here in El Moral has remained dark, though it probably stands as by far the more disturbing half of the story. It turns out that Coahuila state police ran all of this smuggling. To cash in on irresistibly large profits to be made, in mid-2021 they created a sophisticated criminal conveyor belt system of minivan caravan transportation, stash housing in abandoned factories, and security personnel that could only have operated in the open at such a scale because it was the government doing it all.
Video Report: Mexico’s Death Train Contributing to Crisis
Tijuana and Mexicali Across from California – November 2022
Mexico’s First Muslim Immigrant Shelter: A U.S. National Security Perspective in Tijuana
TIJUANA, Mexico – National security was never mentioned in the short-lived initial blast of laudatory media coverage that welcomed Mexico’s first only-Muslim immigrant shelter’s June 2022 grand opening. But in light of the historically high apprehensions of special interest aliens on the FBI watch list amid so many got-aways, Todd Bensman visited the Tijuana shelter over several days in November to answer unasked national security-related questions. He spoke with several shelter guests and conducted the first interview of its director about the sensitive national security issues the operation naturally raises for the United States.
Also see a version of this report in The Federalist
See Video Report:
Legalized Border Crossing for All: The Next Stage of Biden’s Migration Crisis as seen in Mexicali
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson: “One of the most important investigations from the border in a long time…”
MEXICALI, Mexico – Bensman gained rare access to a secretive, expanding program that makes border crossing “legal.” Thousands of intending border crossers are hearing about this new legal way in – and swamping an expanding system of Mexican shelters that gradually feed their occupants through American ports of entry with temporary legal status and opportunity to make the big move permanent. Local authorities are feverishly working to expand shelter facilities and establish new ones to accommodate the soaring demand for the legalized crossings, two shelter managers in Mexicali and one in Tijuana told Bensman.
See the Video report:
CIS Field Work Breaks Two Stories South of the Border
Parsing Immigration Policy, Episode 86
The Center’s Senior National Security Fellow, Todd Bensman, traveled to Mexico to investigate rumors about a shelter in Tijuana serving only Muslim migrants and about thousands of illegal immigrants being funneled into the United States through ports of entry under a questionable program that makes border crossing legal. His trip took him to Tijuana and Mexicali.
A May 2022 Visit to Del Rio Sector and Piedras Negras – May 2022
A Roaring Border Conveyor Belt Imports Immigrants from Border to American Interior
DEL RIO, Texas – Seven-days-per-week bus and plane transports are hauling tens of thousands of border-crossing illegal aliens from Del Rio, Texas into America’s interior despite a judge’s ruling that the Biden administration maintain the Title 42 instant expulsion policies. What the administration did instead was punch exemptions into the policy so that more and more can get into the United States. These operations are not only spiking, but likely evidence of a border-wide development. The likely culprit is that, in Del Rio Sector and likely other busier Texas Border Patrol sectors, single adult aliens and families from South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East came in greater numbers on news that Title 42 would be ended, and then discovered the Biden administration was exempting them from the expulsion policy in any case.
America’s Other Southern Border: Mexico-Guatemala – January 2022
Mexico’s Duplicitous ‘Ant Operation’ Moved Tens of Thousands to the U.S. Border Sight Unseen — and Will Through 2022
TAPACHULA, Mexico (Chiapas State) – Just after Christmas 2021, following almost nonstop civil disturbances by the dammed-up and frustrated immigrants, the Mexican government suddenly solved everyone’s problem with a crafty ruse to send thousands of migrants to the American border in the coming year without raising any alarms. The Mexican government mass-distributed an electronic “QR code visa” almost overnight, then arranged for their exodus by hundreds of buses in atomized groupings sent across 14 different Mexican states farther north. Most Americans and even Mexicans failed to notice that a huge but purposefully diffused surge of people to the American border had even happened, let alone why.
In Mexico’s Deep South, the United Nations Explains Handing Cash to U.S.-Bound Migrants
TAPACHULA, Mexico – As the Center for Immigration Studies has previously reported after first seeing the cash cards distributed at a Reynosa, Mexico, migrant camp, the United Nations is sharply escalating the amounts of cash and other direct financial assistance to immigrants all along the migrant trail from Panama to Texas, at an uncharted series of some 100 waystations like this one in Tapachula. It is part of a program the United Nations calls “cash-based interventions” (CBI). UN documents say the program is meant to “restore feelings of choice and empowerment to beneficiaries”, a part of which may well mean that migrants are able to keep moving north rather than returning home. To date, the United Nations has remained mum about any of this nascent public controversy. But in Tapachula, the agency’s local public information officer for Mexico, Silvia Garduno, agreed to answer some written questions about the program for the Center for Immigration Studies, but did not answer follow-up questions by publication time. What Garduno did say follows:
UN Funds Harvesting ‘Repressed Memories’ of U.S.-Bound Migrants in Mexico
TAPACHULA, Mexico – With their newfound memories of more eligible claims, the immigrants get asylum (a term many use interchangeably with refugee status) and Mexican residency cards, which many then promptly use to pass through Mexico and make illegal entry over the American border. Those rejected for Mexican asylum get new stories to help with their appeals, allowing them to continue north to the U.S.
Biden Administration Secretively Renews Daily Air-Repatriation Flights to Haiti
TAPACHULA, Mexico – Interviews with dozens of Haitian migrants in Tapachula during a week-long visit stand as a vivid testament to the power of deportation flights to suppress illegal immigration, a metaphorical nuclear option. Many, like a Haitian woman who gave her name as Lisette, who just arrived through Guatemala after four years of living in Chile, said the new flights have changed their original life plans from illegally crossing the U.S. border to semi-permanent settlement in Mexico. They’ll stay in Mexico for years if necessary, or until Biden’s Department of Homeland Security once again ends the flight specter.
“It’s not possible to cross now. It’s too dangerous to enter like that,” Lisette said. “If you make it into the U.S. you don’t know how it’s going to go with immigration. That’s why we’re waiting here. For the moment, we’re trying to go legally in Mexico.”
CIS Podcast: The UN’s Role in Aiding and Abetting Illegal Immigration
Nonprofit migrant advocacy organizations near Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala are offering an unusual and controversial psychological therapy to enable migrants to continue on the trail north to the U.S. border. Todd Bensman, the Center’s senior national security fellow, spent a week reporting from Tapachula, Mexico, where he found that at least two UN-funded organizations employ clinical psychologists to help migrants turned down for Mexican asylum to retrieve “repressed memories” of persecution and other hardships to help them in their appeals. The 90 percent who succeed in winning Mexican asylum with these newly discovered stories are then able to freely travel north and cross the U.S. border illegally. Bensman also uncovered that the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), which receives billions in U.S. taxpayer funding, is supplying cash debit cards to migrants all along the migrant trail, further abetting the mass migration crisis.
Media from America’s Other Southern Border
Bensman in the War Room: Mexico Is Using QR Code Visas To Hide Tens Of Thousands Of Migrants
On Brannon House Show from Mexico: How Mexico Covertly Moved Thousands of Immigrants to US
Bensman on Chris Saucedo Show, Talking UN Support for Illegal Immigration
On the BOrder Podcast with Bo Snerdley: UN Funds Migrant Memory Recovery for Mexican Asylum
Immigrant Protest in Southern Mexico, UN Debit Card Handouts: The Dr. Gina Show Real America’s Voice
‘Ant Operation’ Revealed in Tapachula Mexico: Bensman on the Dr. Gina Show, Real America’s Voice
Rio Grande Valley and Reynosa, Mexico – November 2021
Don’t Look Now, but ICE Is Deporting Central American Families by Air
MCALLEN, Texas – President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is carrying out secretive and escalating air deportations of tens of thousands of migrant border-crossers, a high percentage of them evidently Central American women and children who were supposed to be protected from deportation and, more recently, Haitians. The air deportation operations to distant home countries, a tactic that has proven highly effective at deterring follow-on illegal migration, appear to have ferried home significant numbers of migrants who recently crossed the southern border illegally — probably well in excess of 65,000 from August through October and thousands more in November, a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analysis of aircraft flight data, direct observation at the McAllen airport, a pilot interview, and other public information indicate.
Related: See Video Report on Air Deportations from Rio Grande Valley
Inside a Most Unusual Mexican Migrant Camp; UN Handing Out Cash Debit Cards
REYNOSA, Mexico – Boiled down, Senda De Vida helps expelled or newly arrived migrants begin the process of seeking asylum in the United States from Reynosa (often with a new cell phone app and assisted by American immigration lawyers) and then to wait in line for a rich reward: a CPB invitation to enter the United States at the port of entry on the way to settling in an American city of their choosing and to work while waiting for their asylum claims to adjudicate. The Biden administration has allowed hundreds of thousands to receive the same reward already after many of those migrants paid steep smuggling fees to criminal Mexican syndicates and crossed illegally, with many still ending up expelled under Title 42 after paying.
But the Reynosa system offers a chance to bypass that investment risk and expense for those willing to wait – sometimes for several months – in conditions made comfortable enough to create a strong enticement for more migrants to try it out. Mexican government agencies, unspecified private donors, and immigration advocates support all migrant needs for as long as it takes for the migrants to get across.
The Del Rio Mass Migrant Encampment – 8 Days of September 2021, Acuna and Piedras Negras, Mexico
A New Beachhead Opens in the Biden Border Crisis
15,000 Haitians and Cubans mass in Del Rio, Texas, amid obvious Border Patrol stand-down orders
DEL RIO, Texas – Thousands of mostly Haitian migrants (joined by Cubans and other nationalities) have poured entirely unopposed across the Rio Grande and occupied a massive beachhead here on the Texas side that is unparalleled in size, filth, and as an escalating management challenge to a Joe Biden administration that has so far refused to publicly acknowledge it. But this remarkable development in the border crisis will not be ignored for long as hundreds of new migrants per hour arrive, far faster than Border Patrol agents and National Guard personnel process them. In barely a week, the number of illegal immigrants who have walked over a cyclically low Rio Grande reached 10,000, city officials – notably not federal representatives – said Thursday during a tightly managed press “tour” arranged by the city of Del Rio that was stopped some 200 yards from the migrants. The numbers appear to be growing by the hour with no end in sight, ballooning from some 2,000 on Sunday to 6,000 by Wednesday, to 8,000 by Thursday morning and then to 10,000 by that evening.
“In my 20-year career, I have never seen anything this out of control,” one CBP officer told CIS.
Why the Huge Illegal Alien Camp Formed in Del Rio
A surprising explanation from the migrants themselves
ACUNA, Mexico – As federal and state authorities work to shutter the migrant shantytown, a basic necessary question has gone unasked and unanswered: Why did this happen? The answer to that might better inform any American response to make sure it never happens again, with an encampment of that size’s latent public safety and national security threat. To find the answer, this writer came to Ciudad Acuna, the city through which the migrants had passed to form the encampment and asked several dozen of them what happened. The surprising answer, which the migrants provided independently in different places and at different times, was universal: on Sunday, September 12, the Mexican government effectively sent a mass of migrants it had bottled up for months in its southern states up to the American border. This move, which appears to have been done under the cover of Mexico’s independence week of celebration known as El Grito, essentially foisted a humanitarian problem onto the Americans in a single week.
Biden Administration’s Air Deportations to Haiti Send Some Fleeing Back to Mexico
Buying bus tickets back to Tapachula in the south
CIUDAD ACUNA, Mexico — An uncharacteristic policy choice by President Joe Biden’s administration to begin deporting Haitian migrants from the Del Rio, Texas, camp to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, struck immigrants here with such force that dozens are boarding buses and returning the way they came, angered or saddened and unwilling even to risk any alternative attempt to cross elsewhere. Late Sunday, this writer found and interviewed dozens of Haitians in the Ciudad Acuna bus station buying south-bound tickets to get as far away from Texas as possible — a stark reversal from just days earlier when cavalcades of buses arriving from southern Mexico were disgorging Haitians headed to the Del Rio encampment. Over the weekend, the Department of Homeland Security removed 3,300 of the Haitians from the camp and flew 327 to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. DHS announced that daily flights will continue.
Where Are Del Rio’s Haitians Going?
DEL RIO, Texas – According to the migrants interviewed by Bensman, they retreated southward from Texas out of fear of deportation to Haiti. They have been getting messages for three days from Haitians who have been deported; those deported include men, women, and children. Their friends who have been deported are saying to stay away from the American buses they are being asked to board. They are claiming that they were led to believe that the buses were taking them into the U.S., but instead they were taken to the airport and flown to Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
PODCAST: Del Rio, A Case Study of the U.S. Illegal Immigration Crisis
Parsing Immigration Policy, Episode 22
September 23, 2021
Thousands of illegal aliens poured into Del Rio, Texas last week forming an encampment that eventually peaked with an estimated 15,000 migrants. Thousands of mostly Haitians, but also Cubans and other nationalities, waited for processing to enter the country as an overwhelmed Biden administration struggled to control the growing camp, and Texas moved to stop the numbers from going even higher. After several days of watching the numbers multiply, the Biden administration moved to control the political damage of the shantytown, and began deporting some Haitians to their native country; however, most of them had been living and working in Brazil and Chile for years, and fled to Mexico instead of risking deportation. But an even larger number of the illegal aliens were rewarded for their efforts and appear to have been paroled into the United States. Thousands more continue to wait in the shrinking encampment. Todd Bensman, the Center’s senior national security fellow, has spent the week in Del Rio and across the Rio Grande in Mexico talking with migrants to understand why they came to Del Rio and why now. In this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, he answers both of those questions and describes the situation on the ground.
Host: Mark Krikorian is the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Takeaways from the Del Rio Migrant Camp: What Now?
DEL RIO, Texas – The 15,000 of the Del Rio camp, however shiny a bauble it was for network news cameras, amount to a typical Texas breakfast hour on any given day, so vast is the crisis that spawned their riverbank shanty town. Two main actionable takeaways from Del Rio that the White House, Congress and the US media should know, study and actually apply to significantly temper the crisis that birthed Del Rio, are that:
- Rolling out repatriation flights to home nations as a credible threat proved to be a magic pill for sharply reducing mass illegal immigration and should be retained and expanded to the rest of the border and other nationalities now.
- Del Rio revealed a deeply troubled US-Mexico diplomatic relationship that relied on carrots but requires a radically different American approach that involves the stick, which proved miraculously effective during September.
Reprinted in The Federalist online magazine
Costa Rica-Nicaragua Border – June 2021
Part I From Costa Rica: A United Nations of Mass Illegal Immigration – Todd Bensman
The world route is more congested than at any time in recent memory, with people from Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Russia, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and dozens of other countries. This aspect of the U.S. mass migration crisis carries persistently ignored burdens and concerns for the American public.
A tricky, unreported route to the U.S. border from U.S. ally Costa Rica to foe Nicaragua, Part II
La Trocha and its environs in the northeast corner of Costa Rica (southeast Nicaragua), and to some extent around the northwestern town of La Cruz, have become ground zero of a roaring unreported human smuggling conveyor belt to the U.S. southern border. The machine on this section of a long international trail is transporting northward unprecedented thousands of “extra-continental” migrants from around the world, meaning non-Mexican and non-Central American peoples.
The bogus narrative of Haitian ‘asylum-seekers’ crossing the southern border, Part III
The story is that Haitians who are now flooding through and gaining admittance to American cities need permanent asylum to avoid deportation to the violence, poverty, and government persecution they’ve just fled in their home country. But interviews in northern Costa Rica indicate that this narrative is mostly fable. Significant numbers of Haitians recently arrived in the U.S. or still en route enjoyed years of peace and relative prosperity in Chile, which boasts South America’s strongest economy and a government generous with residency and work authorization for Haitians. Is a mass asylum fraud underway?
Newly Indicted War Criminal from Africa Reminds of Need for Vetting
Illegal immigrants from Africa pose a national security risk that is different than the more familiar ones from Central America because U.S. homeland security agencies often can’t nail down whether some are radicalized Islamic terrorists, violent atrocity-committing war criminals – or victims of those very scourges. Now comes news of the recent federal indictment against Mezemr Abebe Belayneh, an Ethiopian living as a naturalized American citizen in Snellville, Georgia.
VIDEO REPORT: On the Migrant trail in Costa Rica
Rio Grande Valley – June 2021
Podcast: D-Day on the Rio Grande? The Biden Administration Facilitates Mass Illegal Immigration
Parsing Immigration, Episode 6
Todd Bensman, the Center’s Senior National Security Fellow, traveled to the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas to investigate how the Border Patrol, Texas National Guard, and Texas Department of Public Safety are handling the influx of illegal immigrants. Having viewed this area – ground zero for illegal immigration crossings – by water, air, and land, Bensman shares his observations on enforcement at the border, where federal law enforcement has been ordered by the Biden administration to stand down, and now spends more time processing and welcoming illegal immigrants than apprehending them. Bensman and the host of Parsing Immigration Policy, CIS executive director Mark Krikorian, share their views on the normalization of federal agents passively observing and even facilitating mass illegal entry. Is the federal government in effect running an enterprise jointly with the Mexican smugglers?
Washington Won’t Let Border Patrol Arrest Human Smugglers Offloading Aliens Right in Front of Them
Surely, one of the most unusual yet least-reported or publicly discussed aspects of the current mass-migration crisis is that law enforcement officers do not arrest the raft coyote smugglers anymore, even when they’re just feet away. As a result of this hands-off truce, those smugglers now freely and fearlessly do their work right in front of agents who, as CIS has extensively reported, feel they are under orders to act more like Walmart greeters than law enforcers.
How Normalized Mass Illegal Immigration Looks and Feels
In all my years of working on the border, I had never witnessed anything like what I would see at just one of hundreds of openly established raft crossing points along the south Texas border, a reflective microcosm of a mass illegal immigration involving mainly families and children. All through that night and deep into the morning on the Texas riverbank, I watched what reminded me of a D-Day-like landing of Mexican cartel smugglers paddling blow-up rafts — sometimes two or three abreast in unending succession — brimming with men, women and children — under the indifferent watch of US authorities ordered by the Biden administration to stand down. Mexican cartel raft pilots unloaded passengers just feet away from National Guard soldiers, Border Patrol agents, and Texas Department of Public Safety officers who not very long ago would have pounced on them. In a most unnatural truce between natural adversaries, all badged American authority figures now work under orders to do nothing to obstruct the delivery of foreign families and to do everything to keep them moving inland to processing stations.
A US State – Texas – Deploys Forces to the Southern Border
The State of Texas has invested heavily in a new border security operation to fill what Republican leaders perceive as a federal failure at the southern border with Mexico. It has deployed the Texas Department of Public Safety air, land, and marine. The last time DPS similarly invested in border security like this was an $800 million Operation Strong Safety during the Obama administration years.
Podcast: What I Saw at the U.S.-Mexico Border, a CIS Podcast
During his recent trips to both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Todd Bensman, the senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, spoke with human smugglers and their migrant customers, as well as border agents and local residents. Bensman shares their stories about the consequences of U.S. policies that have caused the surge of illegal crossings at the border. They range from the smuggling cartels’ sales pitches to potential migrants in Central America to persuade them to spend thousands of dollars on a risky journey to the U.S., to the dispersal of these illegal migrants across the country through Biden’s “catch-and-bus” policy of releasing these lawbreakers on the honor system.
Big Bend and Ojinaga, Mexico- May 2021
The Border Crisis Comes to a Once-Quiet Part of West Texas
For the first time in local memories, rising streams of large groups — 50-to-100 illegal immigrants each — are constantly flowing through the normally quiet Big Bend Sector, one of the biggest, most remote, and perhaps out-of-mind of the eight designated CBP operating areas along the southern border. With 165,154 square miles and 571 miles of Rio Grande border in West Texas, Big Bend also is historically the least trammeled by illegal immigrants, perhaps because of its deterring harshness. Not anymore, though.‘There’s no one watching’, a smuggler says.
Inside a Cartel Smuggling Operation Into West Texas
Interviews in Mexico of nine illegal immigrants describe how the ultra-violent La Linea drug cartel is cashing in on Biden’s new border enforcement leniency. The cartel has deployed a cold-call sales force throughout Central America, at least, selling all-inclusive travel packages for about $11,000 to Central Americans, where the salesmen found that word of the new laxity had predisposed young men to buy in.
‘Got-Aways’ at the Border
Why the mass migration crisis is more severe than official reporting suggests. What the general public sees each month are CBP figures that only reflect actual physical “apprehensions” or “encounters”, published as the primary indicator of how many people are illegally crossing the land borders. But got-away statistics would true the total numbers higher into politically uncomfortable reality.
Del Rio March 2021
Catch-and-Bus: Thousands of Freed Border-Crossing Immigrants are Dispersing Across America
Tens of thousands of immigrants caught illegally crossing the border and then released under the new leniency policy of President Joe Biden are now dispersing to four corners of the United States on buses, with some of the more moneyed ones taking passenger jets. They often drop their Haitian, Venezuelan, and Cuban passengers in Florida and New Jersey. Those from Nicaragua and other Central American nations have been delivered to Tennessee, Massachusetts, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and to large cities in Texas such as Dallas and Houston.
How Illegal Immigrants Are End-Running Mexico’s National Guard
The Biden administration has cut a deal to have Mexico maintain and expand a national guard deployment on its southern border with Guatemala, as a means to temper the embarrassing political specter of the mass-migration crisis. But immigrants in far northern Mexico describe at least five methods by which they busted the southern blockade.
Illegal Immigrants Shopping Border Sectors Amid Unpredictable American Border Policy
Aspiring illegal immigrants in the area are among thousands tapping a kind of black market “shopping” network that, in this time of inconsistently applied American lenience, identifies U.S. border sectors that reportedly work well for illegal immigrants. Such shopping would seem a natural outgrowth of inconsistent application of policies across the southern border since the Biden inauguration and various executive orders reversing Trump administration policies.
El Paso-New Mexico February 2021
Border Patrol Agents, the Only True Experts, Lament Wall Construction Halt
A dozen U.S. Border Patrol agents who, by virtue of their 40-hour weeks working with and without new and old border walls, feel they are the only ones who can speak with authentic, first-hand expertise as to how well the wall systems work. Here’s what they think about President Joe Biden’s decision to end construction on Donald Trump’s border wall in late January, 2021.
Video: The Day the Sounds of Construction Died
In line with President Joe Biden’s proclamation to end construction of the southern border wall, the heavy machinery that had built 450 miles of it under President Donald Trump suddenly fell silent on Wednesday, January 27. Bensman was there when the work-freeze hit and most workers didn’t show up at one of many construction sites. This site was deep in the wind-raked desert of New Mexico at Monument 31, some 75 miles west of El Paso and 30 miles further from this town known for a 1915 battle with the famous Mexican rebel Pancho Villa. The fence here stopped abruptly at the bottom of a steep hill. About a mile or so away over that hill and beyond, construction on a connecting wall segment also stopped, leaving the mile-long gap of no barrier at all.
Migrants in Mexico are Growing Impatient after Biden Win
Frustrated that Biden hasn’t opened the border fast enough, Cubans and others talk of simply rushing over. “They are going to do something very interesting, and it’s not going to be at the bridge this time,” Manuel said, based on the chatter in one Cuban social media group of 1,300 members and in another one of a thousand Central Americans who may join in the charge. “If it turns out that there is no hope of crossing, it [a mass charge] will happen again. They don’t want to do anything wrong, but they are tired of being in Mexico.”