The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Todd Bensman on How Biden's 'La Invitacion' to Illegal Aliens Triggered Border Crisis

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

In 2021, Todd Bensman stood on the edge of the Rio Grande River with a cartel member. Despite usually trying to avoid the cartels, Bensman found himself interviewing the man, who happened to be on vacation after guiding a group of illegal aliens into Texas.  “He had his cocaine. He had a couple of friends there. He had a couple of women there for hire, and that's how he was doing his vacation, under the bridge, drinking beer,” Bensman said of the cartel member.  "To what do you owe this great prosperity?" Bensman recalls asking the man.  “La invitacion,” the cartel member responded. When Bensman pressed the man as to what he meant, the cartel member explained that President Joe Biden had communicated to the world that the doors to America are open, creating an exceptional business market for the cartels.  Bensman, author of "Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History,” joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to share stories from his years of reporting on the southern border and the reality of the current illegal immigration crisis. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

La Invitation. That's the invitation that Joe Biden issued to the entire world to come now because the door's open. We're going to open the door to you. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, March 15th. I'm Virginia Allen. And that was Todd Benzman. In 2021, Todd found himself on the edge of the Rio Grande River interviewing a cartel member.

Benzeman learned that business was better than ever for the car. When he asked why, the cartel member said it was because of the invitation President Biden had extended to migrants to come to America illegally. Benzman's new book, Overrun How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. history. Detail stories just like this one that explain the crisis at the southern border through in-depth firsthand accounts. Benzman joins the show today to discuss the state of the board. and what hope there is in solving the crisis there. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. As conservatives, sometimes it feels like we're constantly on defense against bad ideas.

Bad philosophy, revisionist history, junk science, and divisive politics. But here's something I've come to understand. When faced with bad ideas, it's not enough to just defend. If we want to save this country, then it's time to go on offense. Conservative principles are ideas that work. individual responsibility, strong local communities, and belief in the American dream. As a former college professor and current president of the Heritage Foundation, my life's mission is to learn, educate, and take action.

My podcast, The Kevin Roberts Show, is my opportunity to share that journey with you. I'll be diving into the critical issues that plague our nation, having deep conversations with high-profile guests, some of whom may surprise you. And I want to ensure freedom for the next generation. Find the Kevin Roberts Show, wherever you get your podcast. We are joined today by Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and author Todd Bensman. Mr. Benson, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Your latest book is available now. It's titled Overrun How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. history. Can you talk a little bit about your background first? Because you've actually spent years covering the cartels covering drug smuggling, covering human smuggling along the southern border, correct? Sure, yes. In one fashion or another, I've had a couple of careers. I guess I'm now in my third one. But my first career, you could say, was as a newspaper reporter for regular media, you know, Dallas Morning News for 10 years and Hearst News down on the border, 23 years of that. And then I was recruited to join the intelligence division of the Texas Department of Public Safety out of Austin, where I headed a counterterrorism effort and unit in a fusion center with all of the federal agencies. And we did a lot of different kinds of terrorism-related work on the border.

I did that for another 10 years. So in one way or another, I have been working at that border and about that border for many, many years. And as a reporter first started covering it in 2006 during the Civil Drug War, that former president, Calderon mounted against the cartels, 200,000 dead, lots of spillover into the Texas territory. So I was back and forth for three years during that, covering that war. And before I went into the Intel business. And now I'm back down on the border again, doing my old tricks. Yeah. Well, in all that time working on the border and covering the cartels,

did you ever have any close calls with the cartels? No, I wouldn't say, not really. You know, I've had a couple of moments. you know, beyond the Mexican cartels down in the Nicaragua, Costa Rica, borderlands, I did have some trouble down there. I write about one of those or a couple of those incidents in the book. It was actually a little bit more dicey down there than on our own border. But, you know, it's all about risk mitigation.

I do spend a lot of time all along the migrant trails from Panama all the way to Texas and California and on both sides of the border, actually. I was really fascinated, for one, just by all the stories that you tell in the book, overrun. I think it's pretty fascinating, just everything that you've experienced down there, and you do such a good job of telling these stories. But one in particular that really struck me was that in 2021, you were on a reporting trip, and you ended up actually interviewing a cartel member underneath a bridge at the edge of the Rio Grande.

You tell this story, and it's quite frankly pretty wild. What did you ask this cartel member when they agreed to let you interview them? Well, first of all, I always avoid cartel people no matter what level they are. That's just a personal security code. You never know how things are going to go if you run into one of them. But that one just couldn't be avoided. I ran into him. We spoke, we talked.

And then I just learned that he was a smuggling guide for LaLenia. And he was on his vacation. He had just come back from guiding a big group over into Texas, West Texas. And before I could really figure things out, I was interviewing the guy. And this was early on in the Biden border crisis. And the guy had, for his vacation and his recreation, it was kind of a wine and women sort of thing, except actually it was Coke and women. And he had his cocaine.

He has a couple friends there. He had a couple of women there for hire. And, you know, that's how he was doing his vacation under the bridge, drinking beer. And at any rate, I asked him, you know, to what do you owe this great prosperity? And this was amid a lot of debate inside the United States about, like, who was causing this mass migration crisis. you know, root causes and complex interplays between hurricanes and corrupt governments and Haiti and all of these kind of things. And he just came right out and said it. He called it La Invitacion. And I said, well, what do you mean by La Invitacion? And he said, well, that's the invitation

that Joe Biden issued to the entire world to come now because the door's open. We're going to open the door to you. And he laid out a couple of policies that he knew about, that they all knew about, which at that point was the elimination of all deportation from the American Interior, which was a big deal for him and his business because his people were all runners that were trying to get away from Border Patrol, paying $10,000, dollars ahead to get into the American Interior to take advantage of this no deportation policy, which persists to the present day. And so, you know, I regard that smuggler along with all of the immigrants that I've interviewed

as really good sources on this and maybe the primary sources and maybe even the only sources anybody should listen to about why they're coming in such huge numbers and why they're coming now. It's Lendatacian and not much else. Really wild to hear that straight out of the mouth of a member of the cartel. But of course, issues at the border with the cartels, they've been going on for a long time. We're hearing a lot more about it right now. But hasn't the issue of cartels and drug smuggling, hasn't that been a long time issue like you've covered for years. What have been the shifts and changes, though? Yes. This is not a new problem.

In a Homeland Security circles, we call a problem like the cartels and drug trafficking and all of these things, a wicked problem, meaning extremely difficult to manage and to especially ever to eliminate. So you can hope that the best you can hope often is that is to manage it down to control it at a lower level. But what I will say is that the human wave that has come through this, millions of people, we've never seen anything like this, and neither have they. Those cartels have never had this kind of traffic coming through their territories. And so they turned their apparatus around to capture the revenue, like any

good business or industry would. And we have good reporting from ICE intelligence, public reporting, that their revenue moved from somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 million a year for human smuggling to bring people over or to charge them. It's kind of a side hustle to as high as $13 billion in that first year of 2021. That level of revenue, that kind of a rate, that kind of revenue stream changes the whole situation, really, the war on the ground, because they take that money and they invest it in armament. Armament is where they derive their power inside Mexico. And they also use it to expand their influence through bribery. And this is something that is completely different.

We think that more revenue is coming into cartel coffers than drug trafficking profits, which is a sea change if that proves out to be true. But there's pretty good reporting that it is true. And even if it's not true, just the sheer scale of their empowerment, fabulous wealth, fabulous riches. buying 50 caliber machine gun belt, you know, belt-fed machine guns, 30-caliber, Claymore mines, tanks, personnel, you know, all sorts of military, shoulder-fired rockets, everything. So that is going to be a problem for us for a long, long time, many years to come, and not to talk, not to mention the Mexican government.

We are talking with Todd Bensman, author of Overrun, how Joe Biden, Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in U.S. history. And when we hear about the power of the cartels, when we hear about how things have changed for the cartels specifically under President Biden's policies, I think you do a really good job in the book of just painting an image of what this actually looks like in practice. So in May of 2021, you are on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande River, and you write in the book that what you witnessed was an organized machine like anything that you had ever seen or experienced on the border. Talk a little bit about what you were seeing at the Rio Grande as cartels were bringing illegal aliens across. Yeah, I'll try. So, you know, before the Biden border crisis, even in bad times, it was a cat and mouse game down there. You had smugglers trying to get their loads over without anybody noticing them, you know, kind of running and hiding and dodging.

And the police and the cops and the sheriffs and the border patrol, you know, is setting up and hiding and trying to catch them. and we had choppers and all that sort of thing. But when I went down there, my first really to ground zero when this thing is in full throttle, what I saw was like a D-Day invasion landing, nonstop rafts and boats, sometimes four, five, six abreast, coming across the river with fully loaded with on this side border patrol greeters, I guess. I mean, they were kind of like Walmart greeters and Texas DPS and National Guard just all set up to process them into the country. Flashlights on the ground, watch your step. Here's, you know, water.

Here's the here are things that you need. Walk up the hill over there and there'll be a processing station waiting for you. And this is just something that is just, I mean, if you've been down to the border before this, that if you saw this afterwards, is just stunning. It's striking. And it did strike me as the world turned on its head. And it's still like that. It just went on seven days a week, night after night after night,

with just thousands and thousands of people because of policy, being able to just turn themselves over to the Border Patrol because they were being brought into the country by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, and now by the millions right over the border. And it's just something beyond the American experience, certainly beyond any border experience. And when you talk to 10, 15-year border patrol veterans who've just been out there for, you know, 40 hours a week for years, they're the same way. I've just never seen anything like this.

it was positively demoralizing to be ordered to be Walmart greeters for people that they should have been deporting, catching and deporting. And what were those policy changes that caused this, that have led to the situation that you saw in May of 2021 there on the edge of the Rio Grande River and that we're still seeing today? what did we see after January 2021 that led to the situation? Sure. Well, for starters, remember that Donald Trump bequeathed a border to the Biden administration that was under Title 42 instant expulsions for everybody. So anybody who crossed and got caught by Border Patrol would be pushed back into Mexico on grounds that, you know, we have to protect the country from COVID.

Under the Trump administration, that was about 88% of everybody that they caught got pushed back into Mexico. On inauguration day, however, the Biden administration opened three exemptions to Title 42. One was for family units, groups that had children under six. seven, young children, infants, babies. And that was the bulk. They were turning themselves in by the tens of thousands, which I'll explain why in a minute. And then the other category was unaccompanied minors. We will not return any unaccompanied children who crossed by themselves back to Mexico.

We're going to keep them all. And three was pregnant women who were seven months or postpartum. women who bringing infants. So between those three categories, we had immediately on inauguration day an incredible. That's what I saw. I mean, that still was going on. There were mostly women, children, families, pregnant women that were seven months, and the unaccompanied minors would cross anywhere on the border and would be let right in. And that's what caused it, because the rest of the world saw this in selfies and on their cell phones. Everybody has cell phones that the Biden administration was letting everyone in.

What caused that on the Mexican side, though, was a new law. The Mexican Congress passed 72 hours after they confirmed that Biden had won the election. the law had the effect of relieving Mexico of the legal responsibility of taking care of families with young children and unaccompanied minors. It just so happens. So that law went into effect 60 days later when the Trump administration was almost out and couldn't do anything. and all of those tens of thousands of families and people in family units rushed to the border to wait for Trump's departure. And on inauguration day, the Biden administration put these exemptions in place for them and let them in, and it has never stopped. You know, we unfortunately, we've seen that not only are individuals who are family, you know, families,

and people that are genuinely looking for a better way of life trying to cross the border. But we've also seen a lot of bad actors attempting to cross the border. And specifically, we've seen that a historic number of people in America's terrorist watch list have been apprehended at the border. Do we have any idea how many are getting into the country who are not successfully apprehended who are on America's terrorist watch list? The answer to that is no, we don't have any way. I think the government has some data about this when they catch them in the interior.

But oddly, the Biden administration in about April of 2022 put up a statistics page on its CBP.gov website that track the numbers of people on the terror watch list that we do catch. And those numbers are uncomfortably high. 98 on the FBI terror watch list in 2022, and we've had 51 so far in 23. People from the Middle East and from Northern Africa and Somalia and those kind of countries are all coming through. But we also know that close to a million and a half or probably far in excess, of a million and a half, people have gotten away. Remember early on in our talk, I was telling you about, you know, the deportation-free zone and the American Interior, that has acted as a very powerful narcotic lure for the entire

world's population of people that don't want to get caught by Border Patrol. if you could just get past the 100 mile mark, you're pretty much in and never have to fear deportation, no matter how bad your criminal record. But if we're looking at a million and a half gotaways, you have to wonder if, you know, people on the terror watch list got through. I mean, just a few weeks ago, we caught an Iranian in the trunk of a car who may or may not have been on the watch list. but the point is is that they're sneaking in. They're not turning themselves in. Plenty are not turning themselves in from countries of concern. You know, one of the most disturbing elements of the situation on the border of the border crisis

that you cover in your book, Overrun, is the way that cartels, smugglers are using children in particular. Can you address that? How are children getting involved in this situation? Well, remember that the Biden administration left the entire world know, and I mean like in presidential news conferences, interviews with Biden himself, with Majorcas, Alejandro Mayorkas, that we will not turn back unaccompanied minors. We're taking all comers in. And as a result, we've had about 350,000, the greatest number in U.S. history. Up until 2013, we didn't even keep track. That was so not a problem.

They didn't even keep the numbers. So when you've opened that kind of an exemption, you create a really powerful suction. You turn children into commodities, rare earth metal commodities, highly valuable. And so what we have been seeing a lot of is families, families, you know, mom has four kids. So mom rents them out to three or four guys who are willing to pay to have a kid across the border with them as their kid. And the smugglers will generate false parent guardian documents for them. And that has been really a very, probably one of the more common schemes. But another scheme is being done by the, and then that way the families, the mother gets in free, the kids all get in free, and they all try to reunite later inside the U.S. It sometimes doesn't work out. You're handing your kid off to strangers for some period of time. But the other thing that happened is that spurred the unaccompanied migrant crisis is, remember I said that in the beginning, and for quite some time, the administration was only allowing in.

families with kids under seven years old. Well, what happens if you have a family that's got a couple of older kids? And so the whole family would be pushed back into Mexico under Title 42. They didn't qualify. One of the kids was 13. So they figured this out, of course, on the Mexican side, and thousands upon thousands of families self-separated on the Mexican side, had their older kids cross over by themselves, and then they were able to successfully cross in

with their younger kids or on their own by smuggling over, and they would try to reunite on the other side. Well, you know, we've heard stories about children abandoned in cornfields and just like on the side of the road and everybody's wondering why that is. Well, that's this scheme, is responsible for the abandoned children in the middle of the field in South Texas kind of a thing because whoever rented them out or whoever abandoned them, the unaccompanied minors or the younger children who were rented out don't want anything to do with them after they're in. So they just leave them. And the cartels bring the unaccompanied minors in, and there is abuse that happens between

handing them off and the crossing and there are stories about some of them never showing up again or disappearing that sort of thing so this is all policy driven and they when they hear a new policy the immigrants they're figuring out an angle immediately and when you spend a lot of time with the immigrants like I have they explain that and all you have to do is ask them and they'll explain the whole thing to you what they're doing Mr. Benzman, I think, you know, you hear this and you just think, wow, something has to change, something has to shift. You end the book with a chapter titled, There is Hope. What is that hope?

Well, my position is, and in the book, it's a supported by reporting, which is that the Democratic Party coalition, a normal, like mainstream Democrats in this, country have never abided by or countenance the policies that we are seeing today. No deportation, no detention, creating brand new admittance systems out a whole cloth, ending any sort of enforcement of any sort chaining ice to their ice officers to their desk. All of these things are, I mean, I'm just going to say, to say they're just completely crazy. They're lunatic, even by the standards of regular Democrats. And some of those Democrats are starting to speak out about it. Barack Obama in recent year or two has come out against what he's seeing down there saying we can't sustain this. Bill Clinton, the same thing.

And I think that the hope lies in the fact that the Democrats who gave their immigration portfolio over to this extreme fringe lunatic left wing far, far, far left of them, that they will at some point see the light and join with Republicans in a bipartisan spirit to begin the process of enforcing the laws that Congress passed and fixing a few of the ones that need to be fixed that allow for mass migration like asylum. The asylum law, I've got a whole chapter in the book titled Insane Asylum, because it so is, a few tweaks. And I'm just hoping that they'll see the light of day. That's my, there is hope. Yeah.

We'll hope. I mean, I get a lot of interviews. were saying, God, that was so depressing, Todd. I thought, well, let me try to give some silver lining here. And I appreciate you doing that because we do need some sort of hope to hold onto. But truly appreciate your time today for our listeners who want to pick up a copy of the book. The title is Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. history. You can get the book on Amazon.

Also, if you want to read more of Mr. Benton's. work. You can do so at Center for Immigration Studies. That's c.is.org. But Mr. Benzman, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I really do appreciate the attention. And that's going to do it for today's episode. Again, if you want to pick up a copy of Todd Benzman's book, Overrun, you can find it on Amazon. And we'll also have a link in today's show notes. But thanks so much for joining us this morning on the Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't had the chance already, be sure to check out our evening show right here in this same podcast feed where we bring you the top news of the day around 5 p.m. every weekday.

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