Testimony Democrats Refused to Hear

How the UN, NGOs and human smuggling cartels collaborated to overrun the U.S. border

In February 2022, the House Freedom Caucus held a panel to hear bombshell testimony about the growing mass migration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Caucus chair Scott Perry explained that the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had refused to green-light an official hearing and had even refused to allow the caucus to use a Congressional hearing room to hold the panel.

Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, detailed his investigation into the United Nations’ activities on the migration trail, and he shared evidence of how UN agencies appeared to be colluding with non-governmental organizations and human smuggling gangs.

Bensman testified the UN was offering cash handouts, pre-paid debit cards, and even legal and psychological counseling to coach “migrants” in how to answer immigration authorities’ questions about persecution in their home countries.

Bensman testified:

I have interviewed hundreds of the immigrants, most recently on an eight-day fact-finding journey to the Guatemala-Mexico border city of Tapachula. From my vantage point, I can confidently report that there is but one root cause that they — the immigrating foreign nationals — most often cite for coming now.

It is that President Joe Biden opened the American southern border wide to them.

They see, over their cell phone social media, many hundreds of thousands who have gone before secure quick releases and resettlement into America.

And they decide to also gamble huge smuggling fee investments that criminal smuggling gangs will get them in to stay, too.

With such an enticing, motivating return on smuggling investment, no thinking person should wonder why this global migration hit the all-time national record of nearly two million border patrol apprehensions in a single year. With probably 500,000 more gotaways, and that’s an undercount.

But the Caucus should also know that ‘non-profit advocacy groups — and more notably the United Nations — appear to be working side-by-side with the criminal smuggling organizations on the very same mission.

“United Nations agencies such as the International [Organization for] Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are providing hard cash, food, shelter, legal services, psychological services — all along the migrant trails.

Which also materially facilitate journeys that everyone involved very well knows, despite any protestations to the contrary, always lead to an illegal American border-crossing.

In whatever small or large way, the United Nations and the non-profits it funnels money to can reasonably be said to contribute to the current mass migration crisis.

I found my first clue on a Rio Grande riverbank, on the Mexican side: A discarded UNHCR-stamped booklet advising in great detail how migrants can and should travel north for the greatest chance of safety and success. Later, in Reynosa, Mexico, I witnessed the United Nations grantee, the IOM, hand out cash debit cards to migrants in long, snaking lines. The workers handing them out said they give $400 every 15 days to families of four, renewable every two weeks.

The UN tells me only the most vulnerable get this cash. But in Reynosa and again most recently in Tapachula, Mexico, where I saw the same long lines at the UNHCR office, nothing about them indicated acute vulnerability. They were regular family units of the sort crossing by the tens of thousands right now. Some showed me their debit cards there, too, and said were it not for this money they might have to leave the migrant trail and go home.

Further inquiry showed the cards are just part of a vast and sharply escalating UN program called ‘Cash-Based Interventions’ all along the migrant trail through Latin America.

According to the UN documents and migrants, these include the unrestricted, unconditionally useable plastic cash cards, and also cash-filled envelopes in some areas (never a good look — cash filled envelopes), money transfers for lodging, pharmaceutical prescriptions, and for something called ‘movement assistance’, which means transportation money to move forward when camps empty and reform further north.

Credible reporting shows that the UN is providing these forms of assistance all along the migrant trail, from South America to Texas. On a Cúcuta to Bogotá, Colombia segment, the UN was seen handing out food, clothing, and necessities worth an estimated $200 to $300 a day per migrant.

And then there’s important non-cash assistance keeping migrants on the U.S. trail.

In Tapachula, approval for Mexican asylum these days is important for permission to move legally beyond the southern provinces (where I was) — always to the U.S. border, of course. But many coming in from Guatemala innocently tell Mexican immigration they’re going for U.S. jobs — which is not an eligible asylum claim, so they get denied.

But I found a UN-funded solution recently. The manager of a UN-funded migrant advocacy center told me a full-time staff of certified psychologists helps these migrants recover ‘repressed memories’ of more eligible government persecution. This manager told me in a recorded conversation that his group also trains migrants on the front end of the process how to pass muster with Mexican asylum interviewers the first time around.

He said these operations produce a 90 percent success rate for thousands a year. Other UN-funded psychologists offer what sounds like similar work. If this is all true, the UNHCR in Mexico has found another way to keep thousands more on the trail over the American border.

Many can, and, will defend this UN assistance as lifesaving, but others who learn of it reasonably interpret it — [*SEE BELOW FOR CONTINUATION OF THE WRITTEN STATEMENT] — in a very different way, and they want to know more, of course.

However Americans want to interpret this assistance to migrants they undoubtedly know they are joining an historic mass migration. All Americans deserve to know the full extent of it, because the United States is the UN’s largest donor and the U.S. Congress appropriates a huge amount of money to the UN every year.

I also would mention that the border is a national security concern. Just recently I was able to report that a Venezuelan crossed the Rio Grande from Matamoros to Brownsville, and that the FBI wanted that FBI-watchlisted individual held, and that ICE headquarters here in Washington, DC, intervened and demanded that, ordered that he be cut loose because he might get Covid in detention. That individual is now living freely, pursuing an asylum claim in Detroit. Thank you.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS FROM THE WRITTEN STATEMENT PUBLISHED ON TODD BENSMAN’S WEBSITE:

However Americans interpret UN assistance in the new context of a historic mass migration event, public debate in the American square is necessary because the United States is the UN’s largest donor. In 2019, the last year in which expenditures are fully known, the executive branch and Congress separately allocated $11 billion, $5.5 billion of which filled accounts that fund migration and refugee support activities, Congressional Research Services recently reported.

It’s unclear what the U.S. will contribute in 2022. The Biden administration proposes $3.7 billion, and it remains to be seen what Congress will want to appropriate separately.

[Writer’s note: A bill to defund the IOM and the UNHCR sponsored by Rep. Lance Gooden was offered in February 2022, was reintroduced in the 118th Congress in January 2023, and has been introduced a third time in the 119th Congress.]