Trump Has Ended “Absolute Torrent of Humanity” at Border

Todd Bensman lays out Trump 2.0 strategy to secure the border, remove illegal aliens, and take on the cartels

Border expert Todd Bensman says Trump 2.0 policies, inspired by Trump 1.0, are already succeeding and has laid out the administration’s three-pronged security strategy.

Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and author of the book Overrun, told Charlie Kirk that the 8,326 apprehensions of undocumented persons at the border in February 2025 “is the lowest number in U.S. recorded history.”

All have been detained and expelled, or are being expelled, and none are being released, he said.

“Just to give you an idea, eight thousand may sound like a lot, to the uninitiated. But in December 2023 which was the height of the whole thing — if you include the parolees they were letting fly and cross in over the land ports, plus illegal immigrants — it was close to 400,000. That’s night and day.”

Bensman said if Customs and Border Protection continues to see monthly numbers around February’s 8,326 apprehensions, “we’ll have the lowest year of illegal immigration on record.”

By contrast, during the Biden administration, “the typical day was seven to eight thousand a day. But that ranged up to 14,000 a day. Very often we had nine, ten, 12,000 a day. It was just an absolute torrent of humanity,” Bensman said.

The reason: “We were releasing most of them into the interior. Once word of that spreads, they’re willing to lay down their smuggling fee money and gamble that they’re going to get in, too.”

Bensman said the rapid turnaround in numbers at the border can be explained by policies implemented by President Trump during the first days of his new administration.

This early success upends the claims of Biden Democrats because, as it turns out, no “bipartisan border bill” from the Senate, no “root causes” analysis, and no “comprehensive immigration reform” package was ever necessary in order to secure the border.

All that was ever needed, Bensman said, was an executive decision to enforce the law, as it exists: “detention, expulsion, deportation proceedings. No ‘catch-and-release.’ That’s all that was ever needed. It took all of one hour, on inauguration day, to close the southern border — or to get it as close to operationally secure as I think we can ever really hope to get it.”

“Now, having said that, we can’t let off the gas,” he said. “The policies Trump has put in place — those policies which are in line with the law, the law requires those things — have to be maintained rigorously. You can’t make exceptions. It has to be evenly applied, border-length.”

And now, as a direct result of these policies, the migration traffic has reversed.

The essential place to spot trends in western hemisphere migration is at its geographical chokepoint, in Panama. “In the Darién Gap, which I visited in August, there were thousands of people all around me, moving north, when Biden was still in office,” Bensman said.

“They’re reversing. They’re going back the other way. Thousands. Moving from Mexico, back through Panama, then back around through Colombia, then going home. Through, supposedly, very dangerous countries.”

Bensman pointed out that we were told by Biden Democrats that illegal “migrants” needed refuge and asylum from their countries of origin. But now, facing the prospect of deportation, they’re voluntarily returning to those countries in large numbers.

“So, this is really extraordinary,” Bensman said. “But we’re not done. The Trump administration is just at the beginning. They have to hermetically close that border.”

Bensman laid out Trump’s three-pronged strategy to seal the border, streamline deportations, and dominate the cartels. Bensman employed a first aid metaphor, comparing Trump’s border security policies to applying a tourniquet.

“They’ve got to stop the bleeding, first,” he said. “Then they’ve got a big clean-up in the interior. We have ten, twelve million — nobody really knows how many came in over the last four years. And that’s where the Trump administration is gearing up infrastructure right now.

“And then there’s the cartels,” he said. “That’s part of the policy. And [addressing] fentanyl trafficking. So, the whole three-part program isn’t over yet, it’s just that the first part — the most important part, maybe, is that the blood has stopped.”

Bensman said the biggest change in the Trump 2.0 policy portfolio is the decision to bring the Mexican military on board. “They used that twenty-five percent trade tariff sledgehammer,” he said.

In response to Trump’s threat of imposing tariffs on Mexican imports, Mexico has deployed 10,000 troops to execute immigration enforcement duties, “turning anybody they catch back down into southern Mexico, and even doing their own deportations from southern Mexico to home countries,” Bensman said.

Another weapon in President Trump’s arsenal is section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

“We’re using something called 212(f) which is an instant expulsion authority that is clearly spelled out in current law. It allows the president to instantly expel all comers without providing asylum.

“Now, they expected there’d be some litigation, so they put in behind it ‘remain in Mexico’ which also allows quick expulsions. You can claim asylum, but you have to wait in Mexico, you don’t get released. That has been vetted all the way to the Supreme Court from Trump 1.0.

“They’ve got multi-layer architecture, in there. They’ve put far more military personnel down there for spotting, to be in places where Border Patrol isn’t,” he said.

Bensman said the most impactful policy change has been the reinstatement of detention, which is required by federal statute but which Biden and his Homeland Security secretary virtually halted.

By bringing back detention, and eliminating the incentive of being released into the interior of the U.S., the Trump administration has restored order.

“Since they’re not releasing everybody that comes to the border, they don’t need Border Patrol to process them in. So, they’re out there catching illegal immigrants, and detaining them. Instead of doing babysitting. Everything’s different,” Bensman said.

“They definitely learned a lot, from Trump 1.0, on how to shut that border down.”