American Thought Leaders - What Should Trump Do About the Border on Day 1?—Todd Bensman

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

We’re launching a special American Thought Leaders series during this post-election transition period where I will be interviewing topic matter experts and former and potential 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 with Todd Bensman, an expert on the border and counterterrorism and author of the book, “Overrun.” He’s a senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington policy institute.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 Leader 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. We're launching a special American Thought Leaders series during this post-election transition period, where I will be interviewing former and potential future Trump administration officials, as well as topic matter experts, to understand the incoming administration's policies in 2025 and what they might look like for America, Canada, and the world. To start off, I'm sitting down today with Todd Benzman, an expert on the border and counterterrorism and author of the book Overrun. He's a senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies. Todd Benzman, 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 then though then we've seen in the last four years that that will happen the 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. 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? Yeah, nobody really knows. but I mean, 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 around doing their roundups and on the Mexican side, there are 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. There 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 said 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 uh that there would be this is before he even won election he said i'll give 25 trade tariffs on all your products then 50 then 75 100% 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, you know, so the last 10 months, you're telling me we've seen sort 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 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, plus another eighty thousand, almost four hundred thousand people in December. Today, because of the Mexican military operation, the number of illegal crossings fell from fourteen thousand a day to, you know, maybe two thousand a day. We probably had I mean, it's dramatically reduced, even though two thousand 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, you know, hundreds of thousands of

unaccompanied minors to take advantage of what they heard. And 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, fast enough, faster and fast enough to make up for the new ones coming in. And those were foster care systems where they would name, 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 were not in their homes after some period of time. 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 miners. They're just simply unaccounted for by the government. And it 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, 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 Tom Holman as the border czar. Now what does that mean in practice? Tell us a little bit about him, what you think is going to happen. 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 Holman 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 on very specific mission sets that were part 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,

you know, he had a border patrol career, a long one, 20 years border patrol. And he also had a lot of leadership positions. He was head of CBP there for a year and a half under the Trump administration. So for the next couple of years, all of America is going to know this guy. They're going to either love him or hate him, but they're all going to know him. And Todd, how do the gotaways fit into this? This is something that we've also been covered a lot, not a well-understood part of the whole border situation. Well, gotaways, that's actually formal nomenclature in the DHS. Gotaways are just like what they sound like. They're illegal aliens that got through. They were spotted somehow by camera or a border patrol agent

or footprints in the sand or whatever, but they didn't get caught. They got away into the interior. During the last three and a half years, we have had record, record numbers of gotaways because border patrol was off the line processing into the country millions and millions of illegals under orders, of illegal aliens under orders to get to pass them into the country as quickly as possible. So they weren't on the line. So there were a lot of illegal aliens that were like, well, if we turn ourselves in like everybody else, we're going to get turned back because we have, you know, criminal records

or something about us that's not going to work like it's working with all the other ones. We're not going through the processing center. So they run and get through into the country. And we have probably close to two and a half million of those in the last three and a half years are really astounding record. I mean, that's a city, that's a massive city of gotaways. They're going to be tough to round up to figure out. We're going to have to just, when we stumble across them, you know, hope that somehow they end up into the hands of border patrol or ICE so that they can be deported. There's a higher likelihood that gotaways will have some sort of criminal record or disqualifying criminality about them,

which is why they ran. Well, and so this is exactly what I wanted to expand on a little bit. I mean, of course, your specialty really is the national security dimension of this whole, aside from understanding the border realities. So if you could lay that out for me, because it certainly is a heightened issue among the gotaways, as you just mentioned. That's right. One of the big fears about gotaways is that you know, A, we have to presume that, you know, a lot of them are going to be crooks and criminals and bad guys. Otherwise, why would why run and try to get get away? We have had more of a diversity of nationalities coming over the border during the last three and a half years than we've ever had before. 40 to 50 percent of everybody crossing that border illegally one way or another is from 190 countries around the world, almost every place in the world. So that goes for, you know, countries of terrorism concern, adversarial countries like China and Syria and Iran and

places that, you know, Venezuela, Cuba that, you know, we have bad relations with, or they have spies that they'd like to get in here. And so you have a pretty significant national security threat environment. And that is especially true of the gotaway population, those 2 million. We don't know what kind of bad guys are in there, but we can presume that all kinds of bad guys are in there we just had a couple of weeks ago our first terror attack by a border crossing migrant in chicago this one uh where a mauritanian who crossed in march of 2023 in san diego from maur, 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 and

they wounded him. He is now charged with terrorism in Chicago and hate crimes as well. I think that that case right there is a harbinger of others like it to come. And that's sort of what we're facing. I don't know if he was a gotaway or I think he probably turned himself in and they let him go. That's my understanding of that case. So and is there any reality to this assertion that, you know, they're they're they're emptying out the prisons, so to speak, in South America? You've heard this. Well, it's a plausible theory. But I do believe that ex-cons have gotten in here who spent time in prison in other countries for crimes that we know nothing about. I don't know about the intentionality of it. It's plausible,

I say, because it's happened before. We saw this in 1980 with the Cuban Mario boat lift, where Fidel Castro on purpose announced that he's proud of it. I'm emptying out all my insane asylums and my prisons, and I'm going to put them on the boats and let them go to the United States. They're yours now. So it has happened before, but I don't know that Nicolas Maduro or the Castro regime, the current Cuban regime, did that or any other regime did that. One of the things you've talked about with me before is these Hezbollah cells that are on American soil. Let's just say it's not something we talk about very often. Right. Well, there's news about that lately. We know that Iranian agents have been in the country plotting to assassinate Donald Trump.

We know that some of them have plotted to assassinate dissidents. There's fresh prosecution documents up online that you can read about this. I don't know how those Iranian agents got here, or if they were Hezbollah, which is a terrorist group that's closely aligned with the Iranians. But it's safe to say that there are plenty of Iranians in the country right now who are agents of the regime that were involved in some of these plots and will be involved in future plots as well. The multi-part series that I wrote a few years ago about Unit 910 is based, those are clandestine agents of Hezbollah and Iran that live in cities in the United States and build target lists, stockpile weapons to carry out the target list when they get the order. And, you know, my first thought was these are Unit 910 guys. It sounds just like them.

But the point is, is that there's a business model that's well in place, that's well documented. All of that comes from court records from previous prosecutions. This is not made up stuff. I know it just it it it sounds, you know, unbelievable. And they've been doing this for years. I mean, there was another case not that long ago of a of a Iranian from Texas who was paid one hundred thousand dollars. The money actually wired in from the Iranian banks by the Iranian government for him to put together a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. 2012, that one. And, you know, there he was.

He got caught. Thankfully, he went to Mexico and tried to hire a cartel, a guy he thought was in the cartel down there. And he was a DEA informant. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened there? There was a bit of intrigue around the Darien Gap in the past year. Maybe you can tell me, of course, this is this area where there's no roads, where people coming up from South America, they need to cross through this very treacherous realm. We've done a bunch of reporting on it. So tell me a little bit about what the reality is there now. Right. Well, the Darien Gap is a passage, a foot passage between Colombia and Panama. It's the connection between South America and North America that in the last couple of years under the policies of Washington,

you know, something on the order of 1.5 million people from around the world came through, including most of the people on the FBI terrorism watch list that have reached our border. So it's a national security issue down there that it'd be closed. And the fact that it's been open last year alone, you know, 550,000 came through it compared to like less than 10,000 over the last 20 years per year, you know, very small traffic until this thing started. So it's very important national security issue, even though it's very far away from the border. And something very dynamic and interesting happened there. Panama got a new president who promised that he was going to close the Darien Gap. Now, he asked for American funding to fund the air repatriation flights that would be necessary to deter people coming through from

Colombia. He got an agreement on his inauguration day. Alejandro Mayorkas was in Panama City for that. And before the day was over, they signed a letter of mutual understanding that the Americans were going to pay for the repatriation flights that Panama wanted to do and needed to do. But the money never came. They welched on the deal. And so the Darien gap is wide open still. And so one thing that I would think that the Trump administration would want to do is accept that gift on its silver platter and in return, give them all of the money that they need for those repatriation flights. This is the stuff of American national security. I mean, this is in the American national interest to close that Darien gap down.

This administration chose not to do it. They pretended like they were going to do it and didn't. But the Trump administration should just shower them with all of the resources that they could ever want to do that. In addition to all the other records that are just smashed on immigration over our border in the last three or four years is the number of immigrants who showed up and got flagged as being on the FBI's terrorism watch list at our border. That number is more than 400

as we speak right now in three and a half years. To give you an idea of the scale of that, in any one year before this happened, maybe we might have five or 10 in a whole year, usually less, and maybe some downstream in Panama. Panama, because the Daring Gap is this bottleneck, is really the front line on that for us and has been the front line. We have required or the Panamanians have offered, there's a deal where the Panamanians will fingerprint and collect the biometrics of every single immigrant that crosses through their territory and run it through terrorism databases. And so then they catch terrorists on the watch list down there long before they ever get to the American border. They get taken offline and sent home, interrogated, all of that stuff before they ever get here. That's why our numbers traditionally are so low and why the United States has been able to escape with no real terror attack coming in over the border.

They catch them first down there. But I just came from Panama. I was there in August and I interviewed the chief of their main militarized border patrol, Cinefront, that does all of this. And he said, well, given the numbers that are coming through, we have fallen from collecting and checking 90% of everybody who crosses here to checking about 1%. That's why 400 have showed up at our border. They would have caught them downaways, because I can almost assure you that among those gotaways are going to be more that we didn't even catch. said at least 99 on the terror watch list that flagged on the terror watch list at our border were accidentally released into the country anyway before the result results came back because everybody was so swamped that they had to just move them through fast without really waiting to resolve the the the the watch list hits um I've written about at least a dozen cases of people that were on the watch list that were accidentally released into the country. The Mauritanian who conducted

the attack on the Chicago Jewish man crossed in over the southern border. We don't know whether they ever ran his biometrics, but he was a bad guy, made his way to Chicago, was screaming, as he was firing at the police. So, you know, the Darien Gap and what Panama is doing down there and the kind of people that are crossing all through those countries, taking advantage of the disarray and chaos is really threatening. So we've been talking about Panama and the Darien Gap. What about the Colombia side of things? This is something that you've actually visited recently, right? Yeah, I'm glad you asked. There's a big issue with Colombia. Colombia, as you know, is a longtime U.S. ally. We worked together to defeat FARC and different rebellions

and drug lords and et cetera in our national interest. But I am, from what I saw on my reporting trip to their side of the Darien Gap, I am going to advocate and have advocated for the United States to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia, declare that country an adversarial nation, and start threatening sanctions because of what I saw there. I spent a week on the Colombian side of the Darien Gap, and there I saw the Gaitanista Self-Defense Force of Colombia, which is a very powerful paramilitary that operates on all of the controls, all of the approaches, the smuggling approaches into

the jungle there. It's where all the migrants stage and cross and they all have to pay the G guitanistas and the guitanistas also move cocaine to the united states by the ton through there they're the biggest importer of cocaine and other dangerous drugs into the united states from there the colombian government is run by a far leftist former guerrilla fighter himself who appears to favor and tolerate the Gaitanista organization to the extent that they collaborate actively with the smuggling and allow the Gaitanistas to work unimpeded in human smuggling in the open, in the wide open, not at night, not secret, sneaking around stuff, but they control towns. They control the banks.

They control all of the NGOs, the United Nations. Nothing happens in their territory without them okaying it and making money and controlling everything in Northwestern Colombia. And I argue, based on what I saw, the collaboration level between the federal, state, local government of Colombia and the Gaitanista and the UN working hand in glove on moving people that are very often terrorists, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions of migrants through to our border. That's unacceptable. That needs to be called out. The Colombians were supposed to be collaborating with Panama on closing the gap, and they're doing the exact opposite.

They're ignoring all of it. And I think it's time for a major change there. I think maybe an incoming Trump administration should begin to treat Colombia as an adversarial nation, put it in the diplomatic stockade right alongside North Korea and Iran and China, and treat them like that until they start playing ball on their side of the Darien Gap. Whatever the approach to Colombia is, it needs to change dramatically and right away, especially because the U.S. interests are not just about the illegal immigrants crossing through there, but about the tonnage of cocaine and the murder and horror. The central government of Colombia does not control its territory there.

They have ceded control to it. They've got their federal migration officers stamping everybody through right into the Gaitanista machine and conveyor belt over the Darien Gap. I did not like what I saw there. And I think the American people need to see what I saw. 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 sort of terrible consequences to me of this whole structure that's emerged, right, is that there are people who are legitimate asylum claimees and from

a number of countries around the world who it just may 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, you know, 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. You know, maybe lay out a little for me, you know, 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, it would have from zero allowed illegal crossings to 1.8 million a year. So that's non-starter. But there's another bill that was already drafted by the Republican House called H.R. 2.

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 Bensman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.