Todd Bensman’s Overrun exposes how Biden’s 2021 policy shifts—expanding exceptions for families, minors, and pregnant women—exploded border crossings from 200K to 250K monthly, totaling 3.5 million admissions, while cartel-run routes like the Darien Gap surged from 10K to 250K annual crossings. His reporting reveals a "conveyor belt" of processed migrants and 1.5M+ unauthorized entries, fueled by an NGO-industrial complex profiting from Democratic Party factions’ "cult-like ideology," yet mainstream media largely ignores the crisis, leaving institutions in disarray. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the things that appalls me most is the situation at the border.
And more than the idea of people coming in and the danger and all this, what just appalls me is the complete disregard for the rule of law.
This is what I mean when I say institutions being emptied of their purpose and meaning.
What is the purpose and meaning of our executive and of our executive branch of not to enforce the laws passed by Congress?
And if Congress doesn't like those laws and they're not serving us, what is their purpose but to change those laws?
And none of that has been done.
Todd Bensman has been doing some fantastic reporting.
I've been watching videos of him and I have to watch through my hands because he really does take incredible risks.
And he's now written a book.
The second book on the subject is called Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
Todd, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Great to be here.
And sorry that you have to watch me like this.
Well, it said on the promotion for the book, it said you risked your life to write this book.
And I have to say that's true.
Can you talk about that a little?
What is going on down there that you have to risk your life just to report the story?
Well, you know, listen, I typically don't like to, I do mention that in the book.
There are a couple of incidents.
The book is not about me so much as about the border circumstances, the situation down there.
I spent a lot of time with the immigrants.
And when you go into northern Mexico, you know, you have to, you know, think about risk and how to mitigate it.
And there are cartels down there that you want to avoid.
And there are certain rules that I follow to kind of get through it and get in, get my material and get out.
It actually, the worst case for me happened not in Mexico, but in Costa Rica on the Nicaraguan border.
And I recount an episode there where because of some of the reporting that I was doing, having to do with corrupt Nicaraguan soldiers who were in on the smuggling, that I was, I did have a credible, you know, murder threat and had to flee, literally flee this town immediately with all my belongings for my life.
And, you know, I kind of recount that one.
But again, you know, the book's not about those kind of adventures or anything so much as just as a way to kind of get into the story of what was going on and what's happening down there, how the smuggling works and how and who all's involved in it, the extent of all the different characters that are involved in the smuggling.
Well, you mentioned Joe Biden, how Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in U.S. history.
That's the subtitles of the book, Overrun.
But, you know, there are a lot of people who are angry at Trump.
Ann Coulter comes to mind because he ran on this build the wall, build the wall.
What was the state of the border when Trump left?
And he didn't build the wall.
That's why they're angry.
But what was the state of the border when Trump left office?
Sure.
Well, Trump had a, there was a mass migration event under his watch in 2019.
About a million people got in.
But what was typical about Trump, which is typical about any and every U.S. president up until Biden, is that he worked as hard as possible to get his arms around it and wrestle it down and was able to successfully wrestle down his mass migration crisis by the time Biden entered office.
And just to give you an idea, I think at the height of that, there might have been maybe $100,000 a month coming in, $150,000 a month, which was stunning at that time to those of us.
But by the time he left office, he had it down to 20 or 30,000 a month with this kind of cocktail of policies.
So he bequeathed and also, you know, the pandemic played a role in that in the final months because he had Title 42, where 100% of everybody was being pushed back into Mexico that we caught.
Very deterring, that thing as well.
When Biden came in, however, he opened up these vast exceptions to Title 42 for family groups and unaccompanied minors and pregnant women and certain nationalities.
And within a week, we had hundreds and hundreds of thousands just pouring through the breach.
By the time the second month was up, we were pushing 200,000 a month.
By the time we got into further six months in, it was a quarter of a million a month, 50,000 a week, and it's never let up.
It's been like that for two years straight.
So we went from 20, 30,000 to 200,000 every month.
And we've probably let a very significant portion of them into the country, which is why it's happening.
By my calculation, about 3.5 million of those foreign nationals were actually let in.
Border Patrol's Struggle00:05:43
And they send selfies home and to the home village and they come.
And that's how it works.
It snowballs.
Wow.
Wow.
So obviously there are all kinds of problems with this in terms of not having control of our own population and who comes to live here and all this.
But what are you seeing when you go down there?
What about, you know, what are the dangers that we're facing?
Well, you know, I see the world turned upside down.
And so has anybody who's ever spent any appreciable amount of time on the border, where you just had for months and months, for really years, these kind of D-Day invasion craft landings constantly over the Rio Grande, four, five, six boats abreast just coming all day, all night, and dropping their loads to the Border Patrol and to the National Guard.
It was a handoff situation with the smugglers right there in front of them.
They all knew each other by first name and how many more you got, Jose, over there.
And I mean, it was really an amazing, like the cat and mouse cops and robbers thing was over.
And it just stayed like that because it was a fiat from Washington that, you know, you're going to just let, we're letting all these people in and we're going to, within a day or two, you could see the conveyor belt, this roaring conveyor belt into the country that was border patrol buses would drop them off at an NGO on the border and the NGO would arrange for them to get on commercial buses to anywhere in the country they want.
Seven days a week, all day long, every day for weeks, for months, and now for years.
This conveyor belt just roaring busloads and plane loads of people into the American interior, millions.
That's what it looks like.
And if you've watched my videos, you can see me right in the middle of these.
I don't know if you've seen those particular ones of the Border Patrol buses pulling up to the Greyhound bus, letting everybody out.
They process in the building, and then there's a whole other line over here to the Greyhound bus.
That's what it looks like.
So the motivation for the Democrats are always telling us, these are poor people trying to escape bad situations.
Who are they?
Who are these people coming over?
Well, they're everybody because what I just described to you are what we call the give up traffic because they know that they're getting in.
So they're coming in and they're presenting themselves for processing.
But the processing caused such a labor demand on Border Patrol for administrative work that it left vast swaths of the rest of the border unguarded completely.
And that gave rise to the people that did not want to give up because they had criminal histories or knew that they were not going to be allowed in for one reason or another, that they'd be pushed back under Title 42.
And so you have this runner gotaway traffic that has brought in at least a million and a half people right through the gaps in the walls and in the Border Patrol.
And all of those hundreds of thousands of people, we don't really know how many.
I heard the Border Patrol chief, Raul Ortiz, last week in a hearing tell Congress that the numbers that are commonly bandied around are actually 20% lower, at least, 20% lower than what he knows.
So, I mean, the numbers are stupendous.
And all of these people are total strangers.
I often went down there.
I don't know if you saw those videos with a grocery bag or a plastic bag, and you can just fill it up in 10 minutes with IDs, passports that are discarded.
They don't want the Americans to know who they really are, where they've been.
And you can just, it's a strangers from 150 countries from all over Africa, every nation of Africa.
I've met almost every kind of African you can meet on the migrant trail from the Middle East, Afghanistan, from Somalia, from Pakistan, from Iran.
I've met them all.
They're all coming.
The whole world is coming for this on the strength of these selfies from the people that are just getting in and being bussed anywhere they want to go and they're here forever.
And that's the really the source of that is the cause of this.
It's nothing much more complicated than they're letting us in to get in.
So they could be, they could be anybody.
Who are the smugglers?
Well, the smugglers, you know, there are different groups and types from South America all the way to Mexico.
They're all different.
But in the end, they have to pay the Mexican cartels to either cross.
A lot of them in a lot of the areas have to pay the cartels to actually cross.
But they also pay the Mexican cartels to bring them that far.
Some from Central America all the way, but there are smuggling groups like the ones that threaten me in Costa Rica, Nicaragua.
They're just locals, local organizations that move them on a leg.
And it's very often, and there's another leg through the Darien Gap, which is the passage, the jungle passage from Colombia into Panama.
That saw in 2022, usually there's 10,000 a year or less that come through that.
Astronomical Migration00:03:32
250,000 last year.
And we're looking at 300,000 for 2023.
I mean, the numbers coming from around the world are just astronomical.
We've never seen anything like any of these numbers like in any of our lifetimes.
And I think that's why I wrote the book, because that is a historic event for America.
Why not write a book about a historic event?
I'm surprised I'm the only one.
It is amazing.
It is amazing, the lack of coverage everywhere but Fox News.
We're talking to Todd Bensman, who has written a book called Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History and has been on the ground covering this.
You know, there's so many theories on the right about why this is happening.
What's the idea?
Are they trying to bring in a new voting base?
Are they trying to change the makeup of the country?
What is your thought here?
I mean, why is this happening?
So I dedicate chapter four to that question.
It's called The New Theologians.
I'm not subscribing entirely to the master plan voting block, although I do believe that a lot of Democrats would see that as a cherry on top.
But what happened here is that a fringe sliver of the Democratic Party coalition became empowered in the 2019, 2018, 1920 election cycle and became critical to whoever was, whichever candidates were going to emerge from the 15-candidate Democratic field, if you remember that.
It turns out that it was Biden and Biden Odom and gave them power inside the White House.
The fringe progressive, liberal, far, far left were given the immigration portfolio.
Well, those people have an ideology.
I call it a theology, kind of almost like a cult, kind of like a church-based something.
It's almost religious in what it is.
And the regular Democrats have always kept them at bay as just way too crazy for prime time.
But the crazies took over the insane asylum completely in this case and are still in charge at this point.
And those people come primarily from the NGO, the non-governmental organization, migrant advocacy.
I call it an industrial complex.
There is money in the hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts that they are receiving now to help with the crisis that they fomented.
And so my belief is that at the very least, I'm an old journalist.
I come from the old school of, as a journalist, is, you know, follow the money.
That is going to be one of maybe several motivating factors here.
Let's create this massive wave of people, and then somebody's got to go in there and get paid to take care of them.
That's what it is.
It's going to be us.
I got to stop you there, unfortunately.
Todd Bensman, the book is Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.