The Chris Cuomo Project - The Truth Behind the Southern Border Crisis: Insights from an Army Veteran and Border Expert

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

In this riveting conversation, Chris Cuomo and Paul Lewandowski (U.S. Army Veteran and YouTube host, @CombatVeteranReacts), expose the hidden truths, political games, and complexities faced by agents surrounding the US-Mexico border, delving into the complexities of immigration, the rise of cartels, and the dire need for real solutions.  Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

why is it so impossible to fix the border? It isn't. You're being played by the game. I'm Chris Cuomo. Thank you for being with us here at the Chris Cuomo Project. We have a good primer for you today. If you want to know why it is so wrong

that our Southern border is in the situation that it is, the circumstances that surround it, then you are in for a treat because I have Mr. Lewandowski with me today. And this man served our country in the military and on the border for years. He understands what's not working, what would make it work better, and why that isn't happening. So this issue is going to be one of the biggest and most talked about, and it's one of the most misplayed in society right now. Okay? So thank you for subscribing. Thank you for following. Let's talk to Paul Lewandowski about what he knows to be true about the border,

what is and what is not necessary, and why nothing gets done. nothing gets done. Paul Lewandowski, it's good to have you once again. I said I wanted to come back to you to kind of teach people about what's happening on the border and what's not happening and why. So thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. So let's start with a, I want to use this as like a primer for people, kind of a nuts and bolts of here's what you need to know. So what is your opening statement about what you want people to know about the situation on the southern border? Sure. So I think the biggest takeaway that almost regardless of your political leaning is that the border and immigration issues are much more complicated than almost anything you're going to see on Twitter or in a soundbite. They're very complicated. There's almost always more nuance than people think, especially if you are a very partisan actor, again, on either side. again, on either side. Tell people what your history of service is on military and then on the domestic side when it comes to immigration. Sure. So my name is Paul Lewandowski. I am the

host of a YouTube channel called Combat Veteran Reacts, and I cover a wide range of national security and political issues. I served on active duty in the U.S. Army as an officer for about five years. I spent 12 months deployed to Afghanistan. I worked with the Afghan Army, Afghan police, and even the Afghan border police on kind of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. After that, I went to the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked as a senior inspector within the Office of Inspector General, focusing primarily on fraud, waste, and abuse allegations of all sorts in border-related issues, ICE, CBP, just about any issue you can think of relating to border migration, detention, processing, deportation, I've at least had some

experience looking at it. So it's been an area that I've had a lot of interest in and a lot of professional experience in. What was the biggest shock for you when you started getting to understand the complexities of the southern border? I think the biggest shock for me when I started working there was the scale of migration and the scale of the problems that Border Patrol, ICE, the government in general has to try to solve when you're talking about migration. We see on a screen, we say, oh, 10,000 apprehensions a day. And sometimes it's easy to just sort of dismiss that as a number, but 10,000 people need 30,000 meals a day. They need water that's measured in the hundreds of

gallons. They need a place to use the restroom. They often, 10,000 people, you're going to have just about every medical issue illness under the sun. I've seen migrants who arrive at the border and they say, oh, I have a headache. And they get sent to the hospital and the doctors go, hey, this person has a brain tumor. And now CBP has to go, okay, how do we navigate getting this person the help they need? And they've only been in the country 24 hours or less. So just the scale and complexity of all the different issues that happen when you start to see tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people a year moving from place to place. So what's wrong with the answer of closing it down so none of that

can happen? The issue is that there's a stereotype that a lot of the people that cross the border are trying to sneak across or bypass Border Patrol, but that's just not the case. In most cases, what they're seeing is individuals cross the border and they don't try to flee or hide. They present themselves to Border Patrol and they say, I am requesting asylum in your country. And in the United States, we've signed the 1951 Refugee Convention that says that if someone arrives in our country and says, hey, I want asylum, they're at least entitled to their day in court to make their case. And so because these migrants ask for that, it entitles them to, again, a hearing in immigration court.

They get screened first through some other screening processes. But essentially, they're entitled to go through this asylum process. they're entitled to go through this asylum process. And because of that, it prevents Border Patrol or CBP from just turning them around promptly. Like what would happen if you or I tried to drive into, let's say, Canada without a visa, right? The Border Patrol would just say, sorry guys, you got to turn around and go back. We can't do that because so many individuals ask for asylum. Why don't we just change the asylum rules? Federal law will come before, take precedence over any treaty that we signed. It's true. And that is definitely an option. There's some court constraints that we're under.

Again, it's possible to withdraw from these treaties. It's possible to rewrite our asylum laws, and other countries in the world do this. what level of immigration do we want? What kind of immigration? Do we want to be a nation that closes itself off to asylum seekers entirely or drops the amount of asylum seekers we receive tremendously? Again, it's on the Statue of Liberty. The poor huddled mass is yearning to breathe free. The poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. So there's definitely room for the asylum system to be revamped, and it needs to be revamped. It's a very poor system. But it's not necessarily a – you also run into these moral questions, I think, about the fundamental nature of a democracy and an open country and that sort of thing. What do you make of the notion that we are a wall away from being safe? Well, in a practical sense, a wall is just a bad tactic. And even Border Patrol will tell you this.

I've been to existing fencing walls of all sorts. And in some parts, Border Patrol says, yes, actually, this wall does help us detect individuals who are passing through a little earlier. It helps us kind of channel or deter some level of drug smuggling or person movement of people. of drug smuggling or movement of people. But a giant wall, it can be bypassed with enough time and innovation. And this is one of those truths about the border that a lot of people aren't comfortable talking about, is that a lot of the migration is facilitated by cartels. And those are the same ones that move fentanyl and other drugs across the border. And oftentimes, those operations are done kind of hand in hand, right? If a cartel wants to move a large amount of fentanyl through a certain location, they'll know that if they direct a large number of migrants towards that border patrol sector,

they'll tie up the border patrol agents and facilitate easier movement of illicit goods. So you can employ some of these walls or barriers to kind of help a little bit, but these cartels are very smart and they are always looking for smarter ways. I mean, I'm sure people have seen, your audience has seen, in, I think it was the 90s, they built submarines, right? So, you know, certainly, however good you think you've built the wall, people will be working just as hard to circumvent that. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from PrizePix. I got to tell you, there's a reason PrizePix is America's number one fantasy sports app. Three million members.

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you need an online consultation with a health care provider and they will determine if appropriate restrictions apply you see the website you'll get details and important safety information you're going to need a subscription it's required plus price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. So what do you believe are the answers that would make the situation there a more equitable, meaning fair, flow of what America needs and keeping out what America does not need or want? Sure. So it would definitely be a comprehensive solution that would have, one, an element of prompt adjudication of asylum cases. Because right now, you arrive, you get in line for your immigration court date, and it's five or six years in the future. Legitimate asylum cases are stuck

where they can't really work. They're kind of in this gray limbo for years, which is not really a fair way for someone with a legitimate claim to stay to live a life. And on the other side of the coin, you have the ability of people who maybe don't have a legitimate claim. They get to stay in the country for three to five years. They functionally have a three to five-year visa. And so that delivers a bad outcome for everybody when you have these tremendous delays in resolving asylum cases. So speeding up the process, whether that's through increased immigration judges, I actually believe that a kind of immigration court light, like an additional

step that could filter out the cases that clearly are on the surface, just like do not pass muster, um, would even be a potential solution. Um, and some, the rumor is that some elements of this kind of might be appearing in this proposed border bill they're negotiating. Um, but it remains light on details. And I'm always a little skeptical when there's a good bullet point because I've seen a lot of strong sounding bullet points in immigration policy. And then when you read the fine print, it oftentimes gets tough. So it would definitely involve prompt adjudication of asylum. It would involve an increase in the ease of getting a routine work visa. Because again, a lot of these migrants, I would say 90% or more arrive with exactly where

they're going to go and exactly where they're going to work, which says that there's an economic demand for migrants to come in the United States. And coordination. And coordination. We don't go after the big employers the way we do the migrants. And that's about politics and about power and perception. So if you change the asylum laws and you increase the processing speed, most, and by most, I'm being generous because it's overwhelmingly, the asylum cases fail. They don't have proper grounds. They're almost always economic asylum. And now the next question becomes, good,

so when you change those rules in the processing, if it's economic asylum, why shouldn't you have to do it in home country first? Yeah, and that's the case for a lot of asylum seekers. I think the carve-out of the original treaty was inspired by the Second World War, right? They looked at sort of the experiences of a lot of Jews in Europe who fled and made it to the country and then had to say, hey, I need asylum. I literally fled a hostile country, a hostile government, and I arrived here. So that carve-out still needs to exist.

We have currently a refugee program where that's exactly what happens. Individuals in Africa or displaced persons in other continents, they apply through their embassy or through the U.S. embassy and then get accepted and then flown to the United States and resettled. So, you know, there is no economic asylum seekers, right? That is just not a carve out. You have to be persecuted for things like your ethnic background, religion, certain political beliefs. Yeah, people get it. Like those are the protected classes. But the reality is the way the rules work right now, you can come and say you want asylum

and you get in. And then even if you are grounds for it and it actually becomes a case and you actually show up for its adjudication, it's over eight in 10 fail. So what's wrong with changing the system? So all of the asylum claims have to be made home in home country. Otherwise you have incredible processing and increases in processing capabilities here that allow you to determine very quickly if the person who took the time to show up and not do it at home meets muster, and then no catch and release. So if you have a legitimate case and you have a legitimate case, if you don't, you don't

get to stay here, not for five minutes, let alone five years, and they send people back. What's wrong with doing that? No more catch and release. If you resourced it properly, it could work. Certainly, you would have to vastly expand the ability of people to make those claims within their home country. You also have an issue where, let's say you're in El Salvador, right? A perfect example, because they're having tremendous narco violence right now. And if you were an individual who knocked on the door of the U.S. embassy and said, hey, I want to apply for asylum. I'm in danger. My family's in danger today because I am an

anti-narco politician and my family is threatened. That's a pretty strong asylum case on the surface. Well, if what you wouldn't want to have happen is they knock, they make that claim, and the U.S. says, great, here's your form, come back tomorrow, you're number 6,000 on the asylum list, right? That isn't going to help that person. That person sought asylum, and functionally, you've sent them back to the place that's harming them. So that would be, you'd have to find a really creative way to keep people safe in their own country, but then you run into some legally fraught stuff like could we – could the U.S. embassy hold tens of thousands of Guatemalan asylum seekers in Guatemala or El Salvador? Like, right, that would be really legally complex, and the government of El Salvador may not want that. Yeah, but the problem for you is, or not for you, the problem with this idea

is that most of the asylum claims are bogus. Right. And, you know, and so it's not, you know, it's kind of like, I think we got to reverse the dynamic of perception that you have all these worthy people who are fearing for their lives and are actually being targeted who are now going to be left in the harm zone when the reality is, overwhelmingly, the people who come and say they have to come here just want a better life, which is totally fine.

But they get to skip everybody who's coming in under that pretense of wanting a better life, who then can't get in. Right, right. And that's, I mean, that is probably one of the core problems with the system. I mean, one of the other proposals that I actually heard a border patrol agent, like a senior border patrol agent say, is that he was like, hey, we should build, he called it a new Ellis Island.

He was like a large single or a handful of large facilities where everything can get done. And basically you get brought in. It has the ability to, you know, you have immigration judges, you have asylum officers, you have all the things you need to hold these migrants and adjudicate their cases so that they come in. They're not in the country. They're not in their home country. And if they have a valid asylum case, then they leave with a valid visa, an asylum visa. And if they don't, they get deported from that new L asylum. Yeah, I think it makes sense. And I think that you could find all kinds of things for people to do there and work and make money and provide value to the country while they're having their cases

adjudicated. But it seems to me that it's not the fixes that are complex. It's that they're logistically and financially and, you know, therefore manpower sensitive, but they're not elusive ideas. It's that it doesn't get fixed because you can't get any agreement on fixing it. And the real reason for that is that the problem works better than the solution for either of the two parties. Is that too cynical or is that square with your understanding? No, I think that squares a lot with my understanding. Again, some of these solutions, I think you're right.

You know, I was talking to a friend the other day, and I sort of compared it to somebody who's living out of their car debating what color they want to paint the rooms in their mansion. There's many solutions, but all of them are better than the current problem. And I think it's true that the current political establishment, immigration issues are in some ways the perfect political issue because they're very partisan. They elicit really strong feelings and reactions. There's almost always migration and border issues. I mean, this country has had migration and border issues be an electoral hot button for 200 years. And so solving it, right, if there was like a lasting permanent solution that everyone kind of liked, they would just lose a great political weapon. And we see it now, right? Look how many other political issues, in this case, the Republicans have drawn in and said, well, we can't solve all

these other issues where there's a lot of popular consensus because we have to solve this border issue with it. Well, a lot goes around with the border too, right? So now you have national security because we've got Muslim extremists who are really psyched to kill us once again. And you have fentanyl, which is the biggest killer in America. So those both wind up being tied to the border and legitimately so. So it winds up becoming a twofer, a threefer, or a fourfer. The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's why. A lot of people don't get a good night's sleep for a lot of reasons. One of the ones that you can control is bedding. One out of three of us report being sleep deprived.

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You agree? Yeah, definitely. Why? And I don't think it has much to do with the policy making of either president. I think it is just bad luck because there was a policy implemented during COVID called Title 42. And that was a public health authority that the Customs and Border Protection had to say, hey, there's a public health, a communicable disease. So as an emergency measure, we are basically closing the entire border to asylum cases in all but the most extreme situations. we would go to border patrol stations, they would be empty. It would be border patrol agents just hanging out. It was honestly kind of eerie as someone who's used to seeing them be kind of

bustling, very busy centers. And so that Title 42 authority persisted. It actually persisted into Biden's presidency, and Biden tried to extend it. And finally the Supreme court came down and was like, Hey, no, you cannot justify continued title 42, uh, authority, right? The public health emergency is over. And so that meant that two years of migration was pent up on the other side of the border and it all came across at once. And that's exactly what we're seeing now. What about the criticism of Biden that he doesn't enforce the laws the way the Trump administration did?

There's, what the Trump administration did do, and I'm no particular fan of them, but they at least got creative. They instituted, you know, prior to COVID, something called the MPP, the Migrant Protection Protocols, which kept migrants, basically we paid Mexico an

eye-watering amount of money to hold migrants on their side of the border awaiting processing instead of on our side of the border, which was not a cheap fix, but it looked really good because it meant that there weren't people coming into the United States to be processed. And that sort of create, I don't want to say creativity is sort of dismissive, but trying solutions, right? And yeah, the courts struck a lot of them down and, you know, MPP was knocked down by the courts. But I think the willingness to try new stuff was something that they did well and questioned convention. Again, I see some of that in the rumors of this border bill, the rumors that they're going to institute powers that the executive will get to shut down the border after a certain level of- Yeah, they're quotas, basically. They have a quota

that's based on as a function of flow. But so Trump's promises, I'm going to shut the border. So one part of that is I'm going to finish all the physical borders, the walls and all that stuff. The second part is I'm not letting any more people in. Do you believe he can do that? No, no. I mean, not. And Trump's statements are so strangely worded. And, you know, again, as someone who's like a former DHS inspector, like I really look hard at the words and what they mean and using terms. And so his his statements are always so vaguely worded that I almost couldn't tell you what shut the border means. Does he mean shut it to commercial traffic? I'm not letting anybody in.

I mean, not letting anybody. Well, you can't do that. I'm not letting them in. I'm building the walls and I'm going to have a lot more enforcement and no more catch and release. I'm going to catch you and I'm going to send you back or at least on the other side of the wall.

Let Mexico deal with it. Well, I don't think he has the authority to shut the border any any more than Biden has the authority to shut the border. And Biden has said the same thing. It was also sort of bizarre to read. So without a substantial change in the law, the US has to honor at least a certain level of its asylum seekers, the right to their court date. So you're stuck with that. You're also stuck with the fact that there's a lot of just dual citizens. There's a lot of legitimate traffic that passes across the border that you have to let in. And a lot of these border communities, they're not going to stomach, right? You're not going to stop commercial traffic. You're not

going to stop agricultural workers. So it's hard to know what is meant by these things. No illegals, as they call them. No illegals. The trucks can come. People with work visas can come. Dual citizens can come. Of course, of course. The issue is people who are entering illegal and they will not be allowed to anymore. They're going to go back to home country situations or Mexico is going to deal with it. But we're not going to let people come in here who don't have a reason to be here when they're trying to enter. You don't think that's feasible or you don't think that it is legal? I don't think that's feasible or you don't think that it is legal? I don't think it's legal. I think it would violate current U.S. law. I think the Refugee Act says that that's an entitlement to at least make your case is something people have. Again, if the law changed,

then, you know, I don't want to say all bets are off, but, you know, the law changed, then the law changes. Right. And but as it currently stands, that's not really an option that I think any court is going to, is going to stomach. So you believe that the situation right now is perceived as the worst ever just because of pent up demand because of title 42 in the pandemic, you don't think it has anything to do with understood implications of who is president in America right now versus with Trump? Well, I think – and this is, again, one of those points that a lot of people misunderstand – is they think about migration as a series of individual decisions that each person takes. And it's sort of like that. person takes. And it's sort of like that. But again, because this is a cartel-facilitated operation, and it is a very lucrative cartel operation. I mean, I argue that the only people

that love the current system are these cartels, because they get to distract Border Patrol wherever they want. They get paid to do it because the migrants pay the cartels to facilitate the smuggling, and it allows them to move increased narcotics into the country. This system is perfect for them. But what the cartels will do is just like any good business, they run ads, they advertise, they push WhatsApp groups, they will literally put out flyers. And what they'll do is promote sometimes misinformation or disinformation to these families. And they'll'll do is promote sometimes misinformation or disinformation to these families. And they'll say things like Trump said he's going to he Trump's going to win

the election and he's going to shut the border permanently. And that will recruit migrants and migrant families. They'll say, oh, well, now we have to go. So do we have to take on the cartels like terror organizations, even though I know that's a little legally tricky? to take on the cartels like terror organizations, even though I know that's a little legally tricky. But do you think that it is important enough to the American control of its own southern border that they have to greatly enhance their legal and, you know, aggression perspective on the cartels? I think so.

I mean, I think that's one of the high return things, again, that, you know, it's been going on a little bit for a long time. Working with the governments in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are kind of the big three points of origin. It's hard because, as you mentioned, it's legally very tricky. Right. We can't just drop the 82nd Airborne into El Salvador, right? That's not really an option. But also, there's a limit to how much you can work within the El Salvadorian government because they are so weak. They're oftentimes corrupted by cartels. They're developing countries' government, right? There's only so much you can partner with a country like that to be effective in dismantling cartel networks and so the the answer to your question is yeah it totally it's really hard to do well

it seems that the only thing everybody agrees on is that we can certainly do better than we are right now, if only because if we were to actually do anything, it would be better than what we're doing right now. Now, I know that's not fair to the men and women and CBP and all the related agencies because they're working their asses off and often understaffed and underfunded. But I'm talking about changes to what they are forced to have to deal with on a daily basis that our leaders could be in the business of improving. But we'll see how it goes. I just wanted to give people a taste of the reality from somebody who knows it, who's watched it, and who understands it. So, Brother Lewandowski, thank you, and to be continued. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me on.

So now you know. It can be fixed. These are not secrets. These are not maybes. But the problem works better for this damnable two-party system than fixing it. And that's the reality. And you see it in the stymieing of the legislation for no good reason except advantage to one party. You are supposed to be the priority, not the parties. At 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. every weekday night. You can find out how to find that channel on your cable system, on my link tree, at the top of any of my pages on social media. And you can also stream it at the News Nation app. So, let's get after it.