The First Nation-State Without A Border: Todd Bensman
Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz podcast, transcript.
Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz podcast Sept. 26, 2023
The First Nation-State Without a Border | Guest Todd Bensman
Partial transcription.
DANIEL HOROWITZ: Welcome to Blaze Media.
(18:00)
TODD BENSMAN: Thank you. I wish I could sit here and tell you how brilliant I am, but it kind of was obvious. Anybody could have predicted — should have predicted — this. The intelligence community, a year ago, was warning of this after Title 42 went away. The intel community said, we should probably expect anywhere from 10,000 to as high as 18,000 a day, once Title 42 ended.
We wrote, over at the Center [for Immigration Studies], I wrote columns, my colleagues all wrote columns, everybody just said, well, there’s going to be a great pause.
Because immigrants wait to see, when there’s a new policy shift, what’s going to happen. With the vanguards that test it. And we all knew — we’ve seen this time and time again — that big policy change, short-term pause, and then once they figure out that no harm will come to them, they pour through.
So it wasn’t very hard — if you understand the basic physics of immigration — to say, well, there’ll be a pause for a month or two, and then they’ll pour through. And that’s what’s happening. Intelligence community estimates were entirely correct.
(19:30)
Everything that they predicted — the 17 agencies predicted — is now coming true, right on time. Just like we said, just like they said. And it’s just going to stay like this, all the way through to the end of the Biden term, at least.
The only way to stop it is with a big change in policy. Again, it doesn’t look like they plan to do that. We’re looking at, we had last week a 14,000 day, we had an 11,000 day, we’re having lots of 10,000 a day, apprehensions.
So that’s right in the pocket of what the intel community said was going to happen. That’s gonna be looking like about 300,000 a month, going forward.
HOROWITZ: You’re talking about 3 and a half million at an annualized pace.
BENSMAN: And that doesn’t even count the visa invention, the invented visa program of CBP One, where they’re bringing people in over the bridges, still. And flying them into U.S. airports all sight unseen. Those numbers are vast, too, [and] need to be added.
(20: 46)
So does the “gotaways” — which are just a sharp upswing of people running through because the Border Patrol is off the line now, in all the processing centers, desperately moving people into the interior as fast as they can possibly wave them in.
So the numbers are really going to be astounding from this point forward till the end of the Biden term.
HOROWITZ: You literally had in the title of your book, Overrun. You’ve been warning about this for years, when you were a reporter, when you worked at Texas DPS — @BensmanTodd for those who want to follow the indispensable work that you put out, your videos as well — when you go to the border.
(21:33)
Overrun. You’ve covered this issue most of your adult life, in some way, and you’ve dealt with it. Give us a sense, qualitatively, what is different about what we’re seeing now?
BENSMAN: Well, what we’re seeing now is — well, let me back up a little bit. Title 42, which was the pandemic health measure to push back all immigrants that Border Patrol caught, immediately, into Mexico. That was the last thin membrane — or, I guess, kind of low speed bump on the superhighway that the Biden administration created, policy-wise, to just pretty much let everybody in.
(22:25)
By the end of Title 42 they were still able to kind of push, they were flying people home and pushing people back at about 30 percent, towards the end. Only 70 percent of everybody coming to the border got in. The 30 percent that were getting pushed back, it was a speed bump because they have to pay the cartels again, and again. It’s a little bit of a financial disincentive, right?
(22:52)
But the new way, the new post-Title 42 lets in 100 percent — or, I don’t ever want to say 100 percent, let’s say 90 percent — of everybody, instead of 70 percent. And that good news has spread throughout the globe. Every country on earth has that information now. If you come to the border, one way or another, the Americans are letting you in.
And that is something brand new and different in American history, in the American experience. It puts the United States as the only nation on earth that has no border. The only nation that has ever really existed, through the history of time, that has had no border. We’re like this grand experiment in world history of nationhood. To just simply say, yeah, everybody who comes to the border gets in.
(23:58)
HOROWITZ: So you’re saying it’s not just the border, you reported on this and you warned about this, and now you’ve got some data, over 220,000 flown into airports.
So, what does this mean? Anyone from any country in the world could essentially say, hey, I’m going to fly to a certain airport, fill out an application on an app, and say I’m seeking parole in the U.S., and boom, they can just fly into an airport without a visa?
(24:26)
The administration is very proud to have pursued and implemented a policy that they call “lawful pathways.” They created “lawful pathways” to enter the country over the border so that they’re not entering illegally between ports of entry.
So there are these different ways. Like, for example, you can come to the border, and on a phone app, apply for an appointment to see CBP on the other side, and they’ll pull all you in. I have a piece today that shows that they’re paroling in 99.97 percent of all applicants who go through this. There’s like no vetting, nobody gets turned down — 698 people got turned out of 225,000. They all know that.
So you can come to the border, make an appointment on the app, and if you’re willing to wait, you’ll get in. You’ll just get in.
You could stay home, if you’re from 8 different nationalities, and apply through CBP One to fly into the United States and join family, if you’ve got relatives. And they’ve flown in hundreds of thousands that way.
(25:50)
You could cross illegally, just cross in and turn yourself in, and we’ll let you in. So, those are the three main ways. You just, one way or another, you can get into this country. It’s astounding. They know it. They can’t believe it.
HOROWITZ: So if you’re from Venezuela, now, you don’t even have to risk making the trek. You could just apply for this, fly … out of one of these airports. I mean, almost everyone has a relative, by now, after all these years of legal and illegal immigration…. Is there a specific airport they go to, or just whatever they choose, and they just flash their phone at the CBP officer?
BENSMAN: Well, that information we’re still trying to get. We have litigation on a FOIA request of mine that is in, we’re in progress, right now, trying to get the names of the airports. Both the departure airports and the interior U.S. airports. They’ve flown in 220,000 over the past year this way. Right into 43 different American airports.
So we don’t really know exactly which ones. The point is, whether you use one of these “lawful pathways” that they’ve invented without Congress, or you just decide “I don’t want to wait the few weeks or months that it takes to do that, I’ll just come to the border and cross illegally” — you’re getting in that way, too.
(27:30)
We are deporting virtually no one. We are applying virtually no consequences for illegal crossings. We promised we were going to go full Trump on everybody, back in May. But they quickly found out that none of those were actually being applied.
And that’s why, today, you have — this month, I think, probably 100,000 people coming through the Darién Gap. The biggest number in history, ever recorded. Last month there were 85,000 that came through the Darién Gap. That’s 8 times the number, annually, that normally comes through the Gap —
HOROWITZ: Todd, we’ve had Michael Yon on, people, I think, know what it is, I just want to elaborate on the Darién Gap a little bit.
(28:30)
These are people south of Panama coming up. Meaning, all those numbers don’t include anyone from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, usually even Cuba and Haiti. I mean, some might wind up in the Darién Gap, but a lot of them, they are north of that choke-point.
So all those are still coming. But — they’re coming from everywhere, right? But, I get the impression that every wave has a certain flavor. You get the Mexican flavor, you have the Central American triangle flavor. Here I’m seeing Venezuela as the 800 point gorilla in the room. Who are these people?
(29:08)
BENSMAN: Well, there were about 7 million Venezuelans who fled their country 7, 8, 9 years ago. They moved into 17 different other countries around Venezuela and have been living there safely, prosperously for many years. In the Caribbean, think Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, really all over Latin America, and even in Spain.
So, that diaspora pretty much just stayed in place for the Trump years, because nobody wanted to get stuck in Mexico. If you tried to come in during the Trump years you were likely to get pushed back into Mexico, for years, on your bogus asylum claim.
Under the Biden administration, these Venezuelans said, “wow, the door’s open down there, they’re not blocking any of us, they’re taking all of us.” So they all have just been emptying out of these Safe Third Countries — prosperous, safe places —and heading for the border, and then claiming, “I cannot go back to my original country, Venezuela, because it’s terrible.”
(30:30)
You know. And we’re like, “oh, ok,” we’re just like idiots —
HOROWITZ: An entire diaspora. You’re saying there’s an unlimited supply, I guess particularly in Colombia, which has the most of them, and they’re the closest to the Darién Gap, and they’re all coming from there. And — there’s an unlimited supply on this conveyer belt to continue coming?
BENSMAN: Yes. Plus, Venezuelans who actually live in Venezuela are starting to come now. I’ve started to meet, down on the trails and along the border, Venezuelans that said they came directly from Caracas. That’s relatively new.
The vast majority of Venezuelans who are entering the border have not been living in Venezuela for, just, many, many years. The administration just granted something called Temporary Protected Status on 450,000 Venezuelans that have entered the country illegally recently.
TPS blocks the U.S. from returning or deporting Venezuelans to Venezuela. It’s supposed to be like, oh, Venezuela’s so terrible, we couldn’t possibly deport them back there. Except that, almost none of those 450,000 came from Venezuela, they’ve been living in all these other countries for years.
Which is a conveniently overlooked fact about TPS. It’s just an amnesty, by another name, for people who do not qualify — nor deserve — humanitarian protection, at all.
(32:15)
HOROWITZ: It’s one of the many ways we’ve allowed the system to move away from statutory intent. Obviously TPS was primarily just simply, you’re on a tourist visa vacationing in Disney World, from some country, and they have an earthquake — so your 90-day tourist visa runs due, you don’t have to go back for another six months because you have a natural disaster there.
Nothing to do with illegal immigration, cleansing their status, and all this stuff. So now, all these people could stay. Now you, you look at the souls and hearts of these people. I remember watching in 2018 or 2019, when you had primarily the wave from the northern Central American triangle countries, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, particularly, and I didn’t see most of them to be belligerent.
They were a lot of women and children, a lot of families — again, very impoverished, having nothing to do with asylum, not in the interest of the American people, very harmful in many ways.
But they didn’t look belligerent. I look at least of the pictures of particularly these Venezuelans. I see the tattoos, I see military aged men. I see guys that are like, it almost looks like, “we’re gonna get you.” Are you seeing that?
BENSMAN: Well, even among Central Americans, there’s always been this element. Yes, I’ve seen exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve been in the middle of big kind of confrontations between Mexican police — riot police — and immigrants down there. And of course I see the same video that everybody else — caravans were coming through, one after another, they would put those guys up at the front and they would just charge the police lines and batter the cops into submission. And then all the women and children would run gleefully run right through the broken line to the next police blockade up ahead.
So, you’ve always had that. I remember visiting a ceramics factory in Piedras Negras where a couple thousand caravaners were being held. And I guess the day before I got there they had a bunch of gang guys that just burned mattresses and rioted. And they moved them all that. So you always have that.
(34:58)
Haitians are notorious. I don’t mean to besmirch an entire nation. I’m just saying that Haitians —
HOROWITZ: Violent as anything.
BENSMAN: And in their defense, you know, in Haiti, the only way to ever get anything is to riot. So, you know, it’s kind of built into the —
HOROWITZ: I love the way you said that. The only way you can get anything is to riot. I mean, that is the thing. You bring in certain things that are endemic of an area for a reason. I want you to elaborate on a term that, really, I know that you have used this before, others that have covered the border — desperation. When you bring in a bunch of desperation, and the entire culture that undergirds a desperate life, what does that do? What does that do to our communities?
(35:50)
BENSMAN: Well, I think that we’re seeing some of that. We’re seeing a kind of criminality in this country — I’m not going to say that it’s widespread, actually, I don’t know how widespread it is — but it’s anecdotal at this point, but you have just heinous kinds of crime. You know, quintuply-deported Mexican national goes next door and slaughters five Hondurans, including women and children. Mothers and children.
You have a Haitian in Florida decides to — he sees a couple of anglo bike riders, a couple, and goes up and just slashes their throats. They bled to death, in a pool of their own blood, on the beach. Or you have an unaccompanied minor — who wasn’t really a minor — just absolutely slash his patron to death, in Florida, with a knife. The police were able to track him by the blood-pooled footprints going away from the house.
Here in Texas we had a case where an illegal alien strapped two young women to beds in his house and repeatedly raped them all to death, till they’re dead. There are reports of that all over the country, that sort of thing. But I don’t think anybody has quantitatively addressed it because nobody really keeps track of that way, except for Texas. Texas does.
(37:44)
HOROWITZ: I think the harbinger of what you’ve reported, you’ve moved from the border to the interior with some of your coverage. It must be satisfying, in some ways, you warned about Colony Ridge in your book, Overrun. And now people are starting to talk about it. You had that big Daily Wire story, you had a presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, talk about the need to shut down Colony Ridge.
Where you have — we clearly have more of these, that we don’t know about, we have to. Just the sheer number that’s come in, in the last two years, this is going to pile up not just in New York City but in some isolated areas. Anything new on your Colony Ridge coverage?
(38:25)
BENSMAN: I dedicated the final chapter of my book to Colony Ridge, and gradually it has started to pique a lot of interest. Yesterday, I think, the lieutenant governor of Texas flew over Colony Ridge and is calling for an investigation, is calling for more law enforcement, for Greg Abbott go go in there and do more to combat the cartels that law enforcement says is operating in that area with relative impunity.
It’s a no-go zone, in my opinion. I’ve been disputed on that, but I’ve also been there three or four times, reporting on the ground. Talked to a lot of law enforcement. Law enforcement is pretty thin in there, and feds will not touch the area.
(39:22)
So, I think that is a target rich — criminally target rich — area. Somebody should do something. Looks like it’s starting to gain momentum for at least law enforcement to get in there and start. I mean, yesterday, the superintendent of Cleveland Independent School District, which is the school district that I featured in my book — because it grew from 3,500 K-12 to 13,000 now, and it’s headed in a couple of years to 20,000. All Spanish-speaking ESL kids, with a 55 percent lack of English proficiency. Which is extraordinarily high.
The superintendent just yesterday put out a Spanish language only warning to the community of Colony Ridge, noting that four kids just OD’ed on fentanyl in the schools. And there’s video going around about it.
That’s the kind of thing that is — I wouldn’t say that’s strictly limited to Colony Ridge, to that school. But it certainly falls into line with the kinds of social problems that are associated with high concentrations of foreign national kids, coming from countries that are —
HOROWITZ: Yup. And I think, in many ways, your work on that is even more important than the border. The feds, obviously, are part of the invasion force, they’re not going to stop it, because they agree with it and they’re encouraging it.
So highlighting it, at least, in some of these red states, the need for state law enforcement to do something, it really was your work. Because, what was shocking to me was that even after that individual [Francisco Oropeza] was caught killing five people in that community, it did not raise the ire of anyone.
(42:00)
I mean, I didn’t even know the context. I had never heard of Cleveland, Texas. And I didn’t realize that you, ironically, wrote about it — I didn’t get that far in your book!
BENSMAN: [Laughs]
HOROWITZ: So, you should have put it up, up front, because, you know, you were focused more on the border, but this is really where it is. And I always tell people, we go through this with the excess death numbers with the vaccine. You can live in a country with 330 million people, a world of 8 billion, and you can lose 17 million in the world — we were talking about this last week — and you wouldn’t know.
It’s a similar thing here. The numbers of illegals are shocking, but people go on, they live their lives, they don’t know, they don’t see it.
This is what is really, really important, which is what I want to end with, which is state enforcement. Because this is what we need to be doing. Last time we spoke it looked like Texas was beefing up their effort. It looks like Eagle Pass is kind of the big hot point — although its all hot. What is Texas really doing? It’s always hard to tell.
(43:06)
BENSMAN: The newest thing — I say new, it’s been going on since May — that the Texas Department of Public Safety and Greg Abbott are doing is something called “Hold the Line.” Which is that they string miles and miles of concertina wire along the bank of the river that they have denuded of all vegetation and cover. And then they have their troopers and national guard physically, like NFL linemen, block the immigrants at the riverbank and leave them in the river.
(43:50)
So they’re stuck in the river. And this has proven really effective in hot spot areas. So the most recent development with that — they’ve been doing that in Eagle Pass, to pretty mixed reviews, mixed results. Because there are Border Patrol agents that work side-by-side with Texas, or that are in and around Texas. And if immigrants can get to a Border Patrol agent, those agents will bring them in and let them into the country.
So they’re right next to each other working at completely opposite ends. Right? Texas is blocking, Biden bringing them in. And so you still have a lot of immigrants being brought in that way.
(44:45)
HOROWITZ: I want people to bookmark that point. Because that’s why any effort to merely throw money at the border — oh, I need more border assets, Border Patrol — without banning catch-and-release and all these programs, and parole, all you’re going to get is a facilitation of this. Because funding border agents means that you’re funding not just the facilitation of the invasion, but the undermining of even Texas’ ability to do anything about it.
This is, I mean, the breach of the social compact, here, literally. I’ve been talking about the fact that we have thousands of local governments. You know, because everyone is talking about a potential government shut-down. Look, thousands of local governments will be operating. It’s the federal government. That’s all — federal government.
Why do we need a federal government? This, at its core, is why you need it, and they’re doing the opposite.
Any closing words, where we can sew up, and where people can find your latest pieces, you have a couple of them out?
(45:45)
BENSMAN: Just to really quickly finish on the Texas thing, cause there was something really interesting about that. The immigrants, I don’t know who organized this, but somebody on the [Mexican] side organized a mass banzai rush of 3,000 immigrants who just plowed right over the Texans, right through their razor wire and into the Border Patrol hands, right?
This just happened last week. It looked like it was going to keep happening, that they would mass bum-rush, banzai-rush right through the lines.
(46:23)
But Abbott’s doing this other thing where he has his troopers do 100 percent safety inspections on all trucks coming off the bridges from Mexico, which essentially closes international trade. And he did that again. He closed the bridge, 100 percent truck inspections and forced the Mexicans, on the other side, to disperse the immigrants and move them out of the area.
It was very fascinating how, you know, a state governor is able to impact bilateral relations that way. Close commerce, until you … do our bidding over there on your side.
To follow me, Todd Bensman.com is a good place. My social media is @BensmanTodd on X, and ToddBensman at Gettr, and also I’m on Truth Social.
And the book is Overrun, you can buy that anywhere books are sold.
HOROWITZ: Todd, this is indispensable, and I always love work that drives policy change. Need to keep up on some of this interior reporting. It is so, so important. Your stuff is everywhere, it needs to get more notoriety, and it finally is. And I’m glad we could provide a platform here, terrific briefing, as always. I know we’re going to have you back soon.
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