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Dec. 16, 2024 - Epoch Times
22:27
Here's How Trump Can Fix the Border Crisis: Todd Bensman
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We just had a couple of weeks ago our first terror attack by a border crossing migrant in Chicago, this one, where a Mauritanian who crossed in March of 2023 in San Diego from Mauritania, West Africa, the Sahel Desert, that's a country of terrorism concern, sought out and shot a Jewish man, wounded him pretty grievously.
And then when the police came, he opened fire on them and there was a big, furious gun battle.
We're launching a special American Thought Leaders series during this post-election transition period where I will be interviewing subject matter experts and former and possible future Trump administration officials to understand what the incoming American administration's policies in 2025 may look like for America, Canada, and the world.
In this episode, I'm sitting down today with Todd Bensman, an expert on the border and counterterrorism, and the author of the book Overrun.
He's a senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies.
Todd Bensman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Great to be here.
Thank you.
Let's figure out the state of play.
The Trump administration that's incoming, one of the key points that they made is that we have to stop illegal immigration, and in fact, there will be some kind of mass removal, mass deportations, and so forth.
So this is, of course, a very difficult thing to imagine in some ways.
But what is the actual reality that they face today on the ground or by January 20th?
Right.
Well, the deportation plan is mostly conceptual still at this point.
Nobody's yet in office.
It's coming from a campaign, a political campaign.
I do believe they're serious.
They will do much more interior deportation.
Than we've seen in the last four years.
That will happen.
They are putting the players in position right now who will come up with the granular details of operations, the infrastructure that they're going to need, the money that it's going to cost.
That all of those things are still sort of very much in the air.
None of that is congealed yet into a plan.
Just there is a desire.
They've got personnel.
They are going to put resources to it.
And I think it's safe to say that Especially in comparison with the Biden-Harris administration's level of interior deportations, that there will be a very, very sharp increase in those deportations in the very near future.
How many illegal aliens are there in the country today?
Nobody really knows, but there are some pretty consistent estimates that after this mass migration emergency of the last four years, there's probably 11 to 15 million that are here illegally or will soon be here illegally.
Remember, there were different kinds of parole programs that they did.
Those will all be canceled on the first day.
They're temporary, so when the clock runs out on them, people will then Maybe be in a position to be deported.
So we don't really know.
It's a shifting, moving target.
But let's just say many, many millions is a big, big task to try to move every one of them out.
I mean, currently this is still going on, right?
Or has there been a change?
Yeah, so for one thing, the Biden administration went to Mexico about 10 months ago and cut a deal to have the Mexican military deploy to the northern border with us, round up Tens of thousands of immigrants that were about to cross and ship them all the way down 2,000 miles south to the southern border of Mexico and then hem them in behind a military blockade of roadblocks,
militarized roadblocks, and not allow anybody to progress.
And if they did try to progress, to round them up again and send them back.
Hence the name that Mexican media gave this, Operation Carousel.
So the numbers began to decline very sharply crossing the border once that deal was struck and the troops were out there doing their roundups on the Mexican side.
There are hundreds of thousands down there bottled up that were waiting for the outcome of this election.
When I say down there, I mean Tapachula in the Chiapas state, Villahermosa in Tabasco state.
I just came back from a week of reporting down there, so I was in the middle of all of them.
I saw it.
It was more crowded than I've ever seen it down there.
I've been down there quite a few times.
They were caravans that were starting to set out to challenge the Mexican military blockade, thinking that, well, maybe the new Mexican administration will see that its obligation to the Biden-Harris administration was met now.
So we did what we were supposed to do.
Now we're going to let everybody rush forward.
These caravans were coming out.
There were thousands of people in these things.
I traveled with one of them and interviewed people all day long.
And that was the big question, are the Mexicans going to block us up or let us go?
And then Donald Trump from the campaign trail saw what was happening.
And he sat at one of his rallies in North Carolina, his last rally.
He threatened the Mexican president with debilitating trade tariffs once he's in office.
This is before he even won election.
He said, I'll give 25% trade tariffs on all your products, then 50, then 75, then 100% if you let these people through.
So lo and behold, now these caravans seem to dissipate.
In the face of a continued operation carousel, we don't know whether they're coming still or how effective the Mexican operation is going to remain.
This is definitely a dynamic in place situation as to whether we're going to see 10 weeks of border crossings, increased border crossings, or if the Trump trade tariff actually had the Mexicans thinking a few times about letting them all go.
That's fascinating.
So basically, the last 10 months, you're telling me we've seen a dramatic reduction in crossings.
Right.
So December of 2023 was the all-time peak of the mass migration crisis.
That month we were seeing, and also November too, very, very high.
Both of those months broke every record in the history books.
We were seeing anywhere from 10,000 to 14,000 illegal crossings between the ports every day of December.
Absolutely flooding in massive torrents that nobody could believe.
It attracted international media attention that just would not do for a Democratic Party that was starting its national political campaign for president.
With that, those kind of numbers.
So at the same time of the 10,000 to 14,000 every day, you had these lawful channels, quote unquote, of CBP1 phone app applications for parole, bringing in another 80,000 a month.
So you had the 300,000 in December plus another 80,000, almost 400,000 people in December.
Today, because of the Mexican military operation, the number of illegal crossings fell from 14,000 a day to maybe 2,000 a day.
We probably had, I mean, it's dramatically reduced, even though 2,000 a day is a lot.
Historically, it's still a lot, but not by this mass migration crisis.
That's a number that was low enough that Kamala Harris frequently boasted on the campaign trail about how low the numbers were.
That was her mantra.
Look how low the number, what border crisis.
We got them, the numbers are really down.
And she was right.
Those numbers were really down.
The other 80,000 coming across, nobody could see because they would fly them in or they would walk them in over the ports of entry and nobody's even looking for them there.
So you can't see that.
That was what happened.
That's the difference between then and now.
So it's about three quarters down.
When it comes to the border agencies, we've had reports that there's quite a number of children that are missing, that are off the books.
Do you know anything about that?
Can you comment on that?
Yes.
Remember, early on in the administration, they made public pronouncements, the government did, that they would turn back no unaccompanied minor.
And the whole world heard that, and they sent forth hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors to take advantage of what they heard.
They were correct.
They turned nobody back.
They took in all these unaccompanied minors.
Either their parents back in the village were sending them or somebody in the United States sent for them.
It was an unprecedented opportunity for them.
Nobody had ever said, we're going to let in all unaccompanied minors explicitly like that.
So they came in so fast and furiously that the government was simply unable to process them all.
And so they put in place systems where they could move them through fast enough, faster and fast enough to make up for the new ones coming in.
And those were foster care systems where they would find somebody willing to take the kids from government facilities and take care of them.
But the thing came together so fast that they didn't come up with a process to track them afterwards to make sure that they weren't coming to some kind of harm in their new homes.
You know, home visits, calling up, checking, requiring some kind of reporting, medical records, you know, some kind of checkups.
They didn't do that.
And so a lot of the children or minors that were placed We're not in their homes after some period of time.
If something happened to them, they left or they transferred or they moved or somebody came in and got them or whatever.
So the government just simply lost track of somewhere on the order of about 425,000 of those unaccompanied minors.
They're just simply unaccounted for by the government.
Todd, just one quick sec.
We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and author of Overrun, Todd Bensman.
This seems like a very difficult problem to deal with.
Extremely.
I mean, what do you do?
I mean, each case would require an investigation.
A pretty elaborate, you know, on the ground investors calling people like, who do you know?
Where did they go?
What did you hear?
You know, trying to find them.
And what you saw during the campaign was, you know, the government just throwing up their hands and changing the subject because that's a losing subject every time.
That was not a happy talking point during the campaign.
I can tell you that for the Democrats.
I do think that this incoming administration has a lot of, I guess, sharp thinkers.
Maybe there's a way to, frankly, help these kids.
Yeah, it's going to take resources to figure that one out.
And the truth is, is that we may never know until I don't mean to Come off as hyperbolic or alarmist, but until bodies start turning up and it'll be like, well, what was her path to this?
Or what was his path to this?
That's terrible.
We know now that incoming President Trump has named Ton Holman as the border tsar.
Now, what does that mean in practice?
Tell us a little bit about him, what you think is going to happen.
Right.
Well, you know, we all are familiar now with the term border czar because that was the kind of unofficial title for Kamala Harris during the Biden administration.
She's the border czar.
So I think that there's a little bit of tongue in cheek about naming a border czar for the Trump administration and then putting a guy like Tom Homan in there.
Who is just a kind of a bulldog, New York cop, kind of let's get her done sort of a guy.
I don't think any of us know what the parameters are yet of the border czar position.
Because, you know, I think they're going to build that airplane while they fly it.
A lot of the duties that they're talking about falling under that position really kind of already belong to the Department of Homeland Security and all the different agencies under it.
So they're going to have to do, this is going to be an inferential power from the president given directly.
They're going to have to work out the boundaries about what powers the czar has versus what powers the DHS secretary does not have and all of the agencies under it.
But I do think that they will figure that out.
They do have some ideas about how to delineate and what Tom Homan's going to actually, what kind of powers and authorities he'll actually have.
It's all going to come directly from the president, and he answers directly to the president.
So, it's very early.
There may be a little infighting here and there, but they'll figure it out, you know.
And Homan, I think, is the kind of guy who is good for a job like that to sort of really direct his attentions and energies forward.
On very specific mission sets that were spoken about often during the Trump campaign.
And they're going to give him the resources to tackle them using probably resources from other departments.
So it'll be interesting to see how that works.
But I think that he had a border patrol So what needs to happen on
day one, in your mind?
Well, the first thing that has to happen is policies have to be reversed from the Biden administration and new ones put in place right away to sew up the border, to make it so that people will not want to cross it illegally because they'll be deported, detained and deported.
That's easy to do.
They can do that on the first day.
Then they also, if they want to relieve all of the pressure on the American cities that have been staggering under this, they need to shut down the parole programs that we were just talking about.
The CBP-1 program has to end on the first day.
No more after that.
And the flights program has to end on the first day as well.
Between shutting those down, asking the Mexicans or requiring the Mexicans to keep their operation carousel in play and remain in Mexico policy and pushback, detention and pushback policies with deportation, real deportation, I think that we can reduce the numbers that are crossing illegally to like 10,000 a month or even less.
Fingers crossed on that.
I think the American people have spoken that they want that in polling over and over again.
That's what they want.
That's day one.
One of the terrible consequences to me of this whole structure that's emerged is that there are people who are legitimate asylum claimees from a number of countries around the world who just make it more difficult for them to come through.
What do you think about that?
Right.
You know, the first thing that comes to mind about that is that if there are some legitimate, deserving asylum seekers that want to cross the border illegally, Mexico is a perfectly safe place for them to wait while we adjudicate and investigate their claim.
Mexico is a very pleasant country.
It has dangerous areas, but also millions of American retirees that live there full-time and love it.
It is not a terrible war zone kind of a place in most of the country.
We will be able to figure out whether they have a legitimate asylum claim while they wait down there.
Maybe lay out a little for me what else needs to happen as we finish up.
There are problems with the asylum law that it does need to be tweaked.
There will be a need to go to the legislature to fix that asylum law, to make it so that if you've come through 10 different countries that were regarded as safe and didn't apply for asylum there in those countries, then you didn't really need asylum.
And therefore you can't claim it.
You can't shop for the best country.
Asylum is for people that are in desperate straits and just need safety right now.
The Harris campaign kept talking about a piece of legislation that if only they had this bipartisan bill that Donald Trump killed, they could fix everything.
That actually was untrue.
That bill did the exact opposite of fixing the border.
It would have cemented about 1.8 million illegal crossings as allowable every year before they could have enforcement of the border, of the laws.
It would have replaced the Immigration and Nationality Act and allowed From zero allowed illegal crossings to 1.8 million a year.
So that's a non-starter.
But there's another bill that was already drafted by the Republican House called HR2. You can Google that thing.
And that bill provides for all of the fixes, a menu of fixes that bolsters the Immigration and Nationality Act.
And closes a lot of the loopholes that attract illegal immigration.
H.R. 2, you will be hearing about.
They are going to bring that back.
And that's the bill that needs to pass very quickly.
Regarding the loophole, the Flores loophole allows families that cross the border to not be detained.
That means that families that cross the border, anybody that comes in with a kid, gets in and gets released.
And the Trump administration tried to amend it through the regulatory processes and got all the way to the end.
They just needed another week when the term ended.
The Biden administration came in and ended the process.
So the Flores loophole remains.
So the Trump administration will need to go through and finish the job there and close that loophole so that families that cross illegally can be detained and deported together.
Okay, well, Todd Bensman, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Hey, thanks for having me.
I appreciate being here.
Thank you all for joining Todd Benzman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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