Todd Bensman - OVERRUN: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History

Hearts of Oak Podcast

Show Notes and Transcript

Todd Bensman, a Senior National Security Fellow, joins Hearts of Oak to discuss his book "OVERRUN" focusing on how Joe Biden's policies have led to the current border crisis. He highlights the role of progressive Democrats in this issue and emphasizes that most immigrants are seeking economic opportunities. Todd talks about the collaboration between the US and Mexico, the use of technology for legal crossings, and challenges posed by individuals from terrorism-prone countries. He suggests immediate deportation measures and disrupting support networks as potential solutions to the crisis, stressing informed decision-making.
Todd's insights provide valuable perspectives on immigration policies and their implications.

OVERRUN: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History Available from Amazon in book e-book and audio-book https://amzn.eu/d/233iYg9

Todd Bensman is an editorialist and investigative author of the 2023 book OVERRUN, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History and also America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration. The two-time National Press Club award winner, a former journalist of 23 years, currently serves as the Texas-based Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington, D.C. policy institute for which he writes reporting-based opinion editorials, speaks, and grants media interviews about the nexus between immigration and national security. He frequently reports from the southern border, traveling widely inside Mexico and in Central America. He has testified before Congress as an expert witness and regularly appears on radio and television outlets to discuss illegal immigration and border security matters.
He writes columns and editorials about homeland security and terrorism subjects for The New York Post, The Daily Mail Online, The American Mind, Homeland Security Today, Townhall, The Federalist, The Daily Wire, The National Interest, and other publications. He serves as a Writing Fellow for the Middle East Forum and also teaches terrorism, intelligence analysis, and journalism as a university adjunct lecturer.
For nearly a decade prior to joining CIS in August 2018, Bensman led counterterrorism intelligence for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division and its multi-agency fusion center. Before his homeland security service, Bensman worked as a reporter for more than two decades, covering national security after 9/11 as an investigative staff writer for major newspapers

Connect with Todd...
X/TWITTER x.com/BensmanTodd
GETTR gettr.com/user/tbensman
TRUTH truthsocial.com/@toddbensman
WEBSITE www.toddbensman.com

Interview recorded 17.6.24

Connect with Hearts of Oak...
X/TWITTER x.com/HeartsofOakUK
WEBSITE heartsofoak.org
PODCASTS heartsofoak.podbean.com
SOCIAL MEDIA heartsofoak.org/connect
SHOP heartsofoak.org/shop

*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.

Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on X/Twitter x.com/TheBoschFawstin

Transcript

(Hearts of Oak)

I'm delighted to have Todd Bensman join me today, just after he was on the WarRoom, actually. Todd, it's great to have you. Thanks so much for giving us your time.

(Todd Bensman)

Happy to do it. Thank you.

No, not at all. Just for, obviously, people can find you @BensmanTodd on Twitter, and ToddBensman.com is the website. We'll get into all of those. You currently serve as Texas-based Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies. You're the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, published just over a year ago, and America's Covert Border War, the Untold Story of Nations Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration. I would love to talk to you just on that book, but I'm going to keep it wider on immigration. And of course, you've over 20 years in journalism. And you've got an interesting mix, I think, Todd, of kind of policy intelligence and journalism. And when I mentioned to some friends in the States, I was catching up with you over there. They all said, Todd, he's the real deal. He's one of the few journalists that really understand what is happening in terms of the border and the invasion. Now, obviously, the WarRoom, they know you. Maybe they're UK viewers. We have half and half US-UK. So maybe for the UK viewers, could you introduce yourself, Todd?

Yeah, I thought you did a pretty good job there. But yeah, I work for a think tank out of DC that that deals with immigration.

Prior to that, had a career, full career as a newspaper reporter for 23 years. That's my main background. I got a undergraduate and graduate degree in journalism. And then when I finished my journalism career, I was recruited to join the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is the big state police agency here in Texas to to work in their intelligence division which I did for another ten years after that so I definitely and then I have another master's degree in homeland defense and security from the Naval Postgraduate School, So I have that kind of a hybridized background and now I'm working for a think tank. So I'm kind of bringing it all together in one place, you know, reporting down on the border all the time, down in Central America, all over Mexico, all over our border to kind of get, you know, a bird's eye view of what's actually happening on the ground. And probably interviewed thousands of immigrants down there over the last few years.

Well, maybe I can just start, touch on the book Overrun: How Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in U.S. history. I've had it as an audio book and I've been listening to it. I know it's available hardback and paperback. And on the back, it says the time has come to acknowledge and comprehend that America is weathering the worst mass border migration event in the nation's history. Millions of foreign nationals have overrun the border starting on Inauguration Day 2021, and millions will flow over until the end of President Joe Biden's term in 2024. Maybe you can tell me why you wanted to put it together, because it is a comprehensive overview of the Biden administration, actually what they have done in terms of mass immigration. So maybe what led you up to beginning to put pen to paper and actually bringing this book together?

[4:12] Sure. Well, remember, I live in Texas. I've been doing journalism in Texas and Intel. So I'm very familiar with the numbers in any average year. And I saw that what was happening that started on Inauguration Day was something really large, unusually large. It was a really mammoth event. I could tell within six months, the numbers had broken every record in the U.S. history books of people coming over. And when you have an event, and then it just kept going, I mean, it was just like, it never stopped. The numbers just were absolutely in the millions and millions a year that we know about, that we just caught, with millions more going through uncaught. And I recognize that we're in the middle of a historic event in American history, history and maybe even world history and to me, maybe it's the old journalist in me it seems like when history is in the making and you're in position to see it somebody should write a book, you should write a book about that, that warrants a book at least, a first brush at recording this history and I hope others will follow in my footsteps and keep going, right now I'm the only one, though.

Yeah, that's what it seems. I mean, what was the there must have been pushback because there have been quite a number of journalists who go to the border. It seems to be for a trip for footage and go away. And you seem to have really understood more of what is happening. I'm sure there must have been some pushback from different sources because the story you tell is a harrowing tale of the destruction and dismantling of American borders.

Well, I mean, it's the book and the story of what happened here today falls right evenly, squarely on the partisan divide. The American left completely ignores my book, will not acknowledge it or even take it on or try to challenge it, which they probably view as providing oxygen to the ideas in it. Or not the ideas, but the actual reporting on the ground of what happened there. And on the conservative right, there's immediate acceptance of all of this information. There's no problem at all. My hope is that 25 years from now or 50 years from now, we won't be in this weird partisan divide. And historians will use my book and find value in it for some future time, really. I mean, I think that's the best I can hope for.

But I mean, there really hasn't been much pushback from the left, except in terms of just sort of indifference, because you can't tackle it or challenge it without creating oxygen flow into the ideas.

So I think the idea is that they've just decided that it's not really happening. This isn't true, that sort of thing, that it's just sort of a blip. And the Biden administration took that position officially for two years straight before they finally acknowledged that something kind of unusual was happening down there. They would deny that there was anything wrong routinely, that anything was up at all. And whenever they did that, the American media would just comply. They would just agree and swallow that and move along.

So, you know, on the one hand, I think that's sort of official denialism and indifference is bad for America. At least this generation of Americans. But for me, as a former reporter and journalist, it's like wheee, this is the best thing. I own this thing. I'm all alone down there with this incredible historic event. And for that, I'm very grateful that they that they did leave off. But I also know it's bad for America. I know.

I mean, it does seem so. Biden has systematically neutralized all immigration enforcement laws.

And obviously, it's not just him, if anything, it's him. But that's a whole other conversation. But there has to be a group within the White House who have planned this because that collapse of immigration does not just happen naturally. There are systems in place. So that had to be dismantled. Does that mean there is a grouping that have come together to actually systematically deconstruct those immigration policies?

Yes, that's exactly what happened. I lay that out in very granular detail in the book, Chapter 4, The New Theologians in particular.

I think it's helpful to understand first that the U.S. Democratic Party historically has not been very far apart policy-wise from the Republicans on border security. Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have always enforced the law to the best that they could and most definitely did not want mass migration. When mass migration influxes would happen, they were right on it to try to wrestle it to the ground and they would pass laws. And, they understood that the U.S. Legal system is very well equipped and written to prevent mass migration crises. So it's not the traditional Democratic Party, but it's what happened in 2020 was that a liberal progressive faction that is on the far fringes of the traditionalists in the Democratic Party who rode the coattails in with Biden for various reasons, partly because he hurried them. He needed their vote. He needed their vote to get the nomination first.

And then he needed his vote to defeat Donald Trump, needed their vote to defeat Donald Trump. And he owed them. And what they wanted was the immigration portfolio.

Those people come from a whole other cut of cloth. They have an ideology. I call them the new theologians because it's like a religion, this ideology, and they took it from Europe. It's the European neoliberal progressives that they took it from, which holds that border enforcement and borders themselves are immoral and cruel and must be abolished in the same way that slavery was abolished once upon a time or in the U.S. Jim Crow laws were wrong and cruel. And they got into all of the positions of authority over the immigration portfolio. And they're smart. And a lot of them are lawyers and they systematically dismantled all of the instrumentality of enforcement at the border and put policies in place that absolutely guaranteed to, like an 80 plus percent chance that if you showed up at our southern border on foot, you were going to get in forever.

I mean, it seems as though some states, some Democrats have woken up as I've read about immigrants getting bussed or flown around. Certainly Texas has tried to make a point on that. And you've got Democrat mayors saying, oh, suddenly they don't like it. They get angry and how dare you do this. Has that woken up? I mean, specifically in New York, when Adam started pushing back on that, has that opened up a rift in the Democrat Party or is that just quietened down again?

Well, the liberal progressive wing of the party, I think, understood that most Americans don't live anywhere near the border, don't see it. It's see no evil, hear no evil, etc.

And I think they were relying on that unique circumstance to get away with what they were doing. And as long as they had a compliant traditional media and the president of the United States and all of his chief lieutenants saying it's not happening, there's nothing happening down there, then they could get away with it. And they did for a couple of years because most Americans aren't down there. They don't understand. It's like, oh, the right wing media is down there.

Let's just, they're lying, you know, disinformation. and eventually the pipeline backed up. To the point with people in all of these cities, because millions of people were just pouring over in massive torrents, unbelievable torrents of humanity all day, every day, just pouring in with no media coverage. But eventually, they had to go somewhere and live. So the pipeline backed up and it burst in all these cities, Chicago, New York, Denver, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, LA, every city in the United States, all over Florida. You couldn't get away with it. You couldn't get away. You could not avert your eyes from it. Now it was in people's backyards and they were mad about it. Did not like what they were seeing, the massive amounts of resources, municipal budgets that were being diverted to illegal immigrants over native born or residents in their cities who needed the money and needed the programs.

Created a lot of anger. And it's in everybody's face. You can go into any American airport and they're all over the place. They're in every terminal, flying still going from here to there. So well

We'll get into flying a little bit another point in the book you talked about kind of the relationship between Mexico and the U.S I think you said within like 48 hours legislation was passed in Mexico and it seemed to be that they were ready in conjunction with Biden with people ready to just push over the border as soon as as Biden came in, tell us more about kind of how that works, that kind of relationship between Mexico and what part they've had to play in this.

Sure. Well, first of all, you have to remember that, you know, when Trump was still in office, he had a mass migration too, but he wrestled it down like Democrats and Republicans always do, until now. He wrestled it down and he put policies in place that were pushback policies. Remain in Mexico, and then after that for COVID. And these were very, very effective. And they resulted in, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of immigrants being captured by Border Patrol, and instead of admitted into the United States were pushed back to Mexico. And that was going on for the full year of the last the last year of Trump in office.

The Mexicans, of course, hated this because they got stuck with the hot potato, right? You know, that game. And it was expensive and they were filling up all of the Mexican detention centers. They were immigrants still pouring into Mexico and being pushed from the United States. And it was this terrible situation for them. And so the Mexicans were listening to the Biden campaign saying, we're going to let everybody in. We're going to be nice and kind and gentle, and we're going to get rid of the COVID pushbacks, we're going to get rid of the remain in Mexico pushbacks, etc. And they waited until the election. 48 hours after the election, the Mexican parliament passed a law that got no coverage, either on the Mexican side or on the US side, that forced, quote unquote, Mexico to empty all all of its detention centers of family units within 60 days or after 60 days. So that by the time Biden was going to enter office, they would be waiting at the border for the transition.

That's what happened. They released tens of thousands to the border. They rushed up there and they knew that on the transition day, Biden was going to let them all in. And even though there was COVID restrictions, he was saying, we're going to get rid of those. We're going to end Title 42, which was the COVID pushbacks.

And in the end, he couldn't do it for legal reasons, but he still opened vast exemptions in the COVID pushback rule so that all of those people could come in. And so at noon, January 21, you could see them just pouring in. It began hundreds of thousands on that day at that hour when the clock struck noon on Inauguration Day. They were on the march and it never ended.

Wow. I thought actually just, I know there's a little pushback on it. Whenever I was over in Texas, I talked to some people and they said, you know, it's not really as bad because if it was, we would be drowning in people. We go about our lives normally in Fort Worth or in Dallas or down in Austin and it seems fine. How do you respond to that? If people don't see it, then they don't necessarily believe it's happening.

Well, I think that there are still places where people can, if they choose, can choose not to see it. But it's in every community. I mean, there's six, eight million people in 36 months across that border. Now, we're a nation of 350 million.

So there's still room to fan out. But if you're talking about Fort Worth, I would just point you to their school district, which is absolutely completely smashed and overwhelmed with migrant kids. And there's no space for them. And Fort Worth is having to pass bond elections that increase taxes to pay for more classroom space and temporary buildings and teachers and all the rest of that. And they can't even close to come up, keep up with it. And, I mean, really any school district in the country is facing something that looks just like that. So Fort Worth is definitely, if you want to see it, you can see it.

What's that movie, Don't Look Up, you know, where the big meteor is coming? There are plenty of people that got away for a long time without looking up and said there's no meteor coming. No meteor coming but they're here and they're here by the millions and all you got to do is look up.

I get that maybe if you go down to California, that a Californian government doesn't really care unhappily for its state to be even more destroyed, where you look at Texas you expect there to be pushback and yes there maybe isn't the wall that was expected but you'd expect the National Guard troops to be there pushing back. But that doesn't seem to have happened in a way that maybe I naively would have expected as a Brit thinking, don't worry, Texas have got this. It doesn't seem to be the case. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes. I mean, Texas has done more than any other state in the country to get some sort of a control handle on what's happening at the border. But ultimately, as a state, they have no authority whatsoever to actually put policies in place that deter the immigrants from coming through Texas. And what I mean by that is, if you're an immigrant and you cross our border and we let you in, you have to be deported in order to have a deterrent. Like if you spend $10,000 on smuggling fees and you get deported afterwards, and that's a loss, a massive loss, you're in debt, you lost $10,000, you're going to stay home. You're going to stay home. But Texas hasn't been able to do that because behind them is the Federal Border Patrol, who are under orders to usher everybody that they can get their hands on into the country forever.

So, if Texas can't deport them and the federal government won't, the federals are going to win out there. I don't mean to diminish what Texas is doing. They're doing a lot of good in other ways. They're catching drug smugglers, lots and lots of them, drug loads, arresting a lot of people smugglers, and breaking up stash houses and patrolling areas where border patrol is not there. So, and with helicopters. And so they're, I think, countering a lot of kind of basic criminality from the border crisis. But ultimately they can't really return immigrants or deport them back to their home countries that's a too big of a of a federal job

Tell us about, because there are two aspects, there's the aspect of governments and how they cooperate and the economic pull and push but it's also the individuals and you mentioned the beginning, you had interviewed many of those coming over but did any of those stand out to surprise you? What were, as you got down the nitty gritty and heard the personal stories, how did that impact you and what did you take away from that?

I mean, in broad brushstrokes, my big takeaway from interviewing literally thousands of immigrants is on their way in before they get lawyered up or before they're in US control or in custody, that they all are coming because we're letting them in. That's like the big take. I know it sounds simple, but you'd be surprised at how many regular Americans can't really get their head around that or just won't believe it, that they're not fleeing something terrible. They're not fleeing criminality. They're not fleeing government persecution.

They almost never talk about that. They're coming for jobs and to earn more money and to enhance their lifestyles. They want to adopt the very famous indulgent American lifestyle. They want to live here. We have a lot of space. We have a lot of money. We're giving a lot of money away. You can earn if you want, or if you don't want to earn, you can get on the public welfare system and live very well. So it's very, I guess, universal, that, that a they're not really fleeing terrible harms at all. They are coming to something much like a good corollary to this would be maybe the California gold rush, where they found a couple of nuggets in the hills in California. And the second word got back east. We had wagon trains and of people rushing to the California gold rushes, not, they weren't fleeing something terrible in Pennsylvania, or they were just kind of poor. And maybe they figured they could do better with this big grand adventure. That I just liken this to that. And people don't really understand that. They're like, oh, these poor immigrants, we must give them sanctuary.

That's not what this is. That's, They're like gold prospectors from 1840, more than they are Vietnamese boat people or Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

And on that, I just want to pick up one or two stories that you put up recently on the website and on Centre for Immigration Studies. And I think last month, the story was a secret finally revealed, Americans can know the US cities, receiving hundreds of thousands of immigrants flying from abroad. That was May last month. And you'd said a House committee data release confirms a Centre for Immigration Studies report that you had done. But tell us about that information, because you'd expect you expect information to be public. And then after a while, you realize when you delve deeper, actually, it's set up.

So the public aren't supposed to really be aware of what's happening. But you're able to list those cities. Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, one thing that the Biden administration felt like it needed to do was remove the appearance of mass chaos of thousands of people. Moving between the ports of entry over the border. Once it got to a certain point, there would be some media would go down there and it just looked awful. And it got in the way of them being able to deny that anything unusual was happening when you would have these huge, you know, surging people. So they came up with programs that would let would-be planning aspiring border crossers to stay in Mexico for a little while longer and apply on a cell phone app.

To cross quote unquote legally. They could schedule their illegal crossings at a land bridge or they could schedule on a phone or on a computer in their home countries to fly directly into the United States from their foreign airports and therefore remove themselves and their numbers from the total coming through illegally so that they wouldn't draw as much attention. Those are called parole programs. There's a flight one where they're flying directly and there's a land one where you can walk across at the invitation of CBP, U.S. Border and Customs and Border Protection over the land ports. To date, we've got almost 900,000 people have entered the United States through these kind of created admissions programs. But then as soon as they announced them, the administration just shut up about them and nobody asked what was happening with them until I came along and I put in Freedom of Information Act requests. I wanted to know how many, which nationalities were crossing at the land, how many were flying in, which airports were they flying into, which ones were they flying from. So the story that's out right now, the most recent one is about the airports that they're flying from.

These are four nationalities for this program, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. And the idea is we're going to bring them, let them fly in because they're under dire humanitarian stress. We need to rescue them. That's the purpose of the program. We're rescuing people. But when I got my hands on the country of departure list, I found that they were authorizing these flights from all over Europe. Europe, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Iceland, Israel, all of the Gulf states, Australia, from places that could not even remotely be called dangerous or where anybody living there could ever claim a humanitarian need to obtain American protection and sanctuary. So this just kind of gives lie to all of the way that they are justifying this thing, this huge admissions program by air that you need to escape from Japan.

You're a Cuban and living in Japan and you have to escape from Barbados and Aruba and the Virgin Islands, all these kind of vacation spots, these beautiful jewels of vacation wonderlands is just absurd, nobody who knows this information could possibly now accept what the administration is saying about that program or even about the one where they're crossing the land bridges too.

Well we had the same issue in Europe where everyone wanted to to get to the UK despite being in safe country after safe country after safe country in Europe, so we had the same issues.

Right the whole thing, asylum there and here is just a complete bogus lie, all of it is just there is no practical use nobody coming to these countries is really looking for asylum. They're using the asylum system to just get in. And then it's like, deport me. I dare you. Track me down and deport me. And of course, there's no will to do deportations in liberal governments like the Biden administration. There's none at all. And they all know it.

Or the UK. We don't deport either. We just bring people in.

What's the, you talked about the phone app and you talked about disagreement. This isn't agreement with NGO. Is this agreements with countries on how to actually bring illegals back and forward?

Can you rephrase the question?

So you talked about the phone app that people can actually go on and then they can organize it ahead. And you talked about coming from safe countries. Is this movement, is this organized by governments, you seem to say, or is it NGOs?

Right. Well, I mean, most of it is self, I would say, is self-propelled, but it's informed self-propulsion. So, the United Nations has established networks of support all along way stations, all along the illegal immigrant trails in Latin America and also in Europe. They're everywhere. Food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical, whatever you need along the route, these organizations, the United Nations, UNHCR, IOM, and many other UN agencies, as well as, you know, hundreds of NGOs have gotten in on the action too. Almost all of it is in the U.S. is funded by the U.S. State Department and taxpayers. I think most Americans don't really understand that the facilitation is that they're funding the facilitation of all of this. And I believe that there are a great many immigrants that would have just stayed home out of uncertainty about the ardour of the trail.

Were it not for all of these NGOs, all along the way, they're getting legal support and coaching and assistance of every possible kind so that nobody ever really want for anything. And that's got to play on the decision-making process to leave home. Of course it does.

It's also the mass economic hit, but it's also the terrorist side. And again, you've put a post up about the recent arrests of the Tajikistani border crossers for terrorism and commented that you had actually testified before Congress on this last year about terrorist entry through the southwest border. Tell us about that wasn't on my radar at all. Do you want to fill us in a little bit on that?

Sure. Well, I mean, this is when I was in the intelligence business and in my last few years as a journalist, I reported and worked extravagantly on the issue of immigrants coming from terror harboring countries over our southern border. And I wrote an entire book about this. I still to this day am the author of the only book about terrorist infiltration and what we do about it here in the United States over our southern border. It's called America's Covert Border War. It's all about this. And I've been warning about this for years. Well, now what we're seeing in the crush of humanity that has overwhelmed all of our counterterrorism programs and protocols down there, we're now starting to see terror attacks, terror plots in very recent times. One of them is the Tajikistanis that you mentioned. That's only the most recent one.

Eight Tajikistanis arrested earlier in June, the first week of June, in three American cities. They all came over the border. One of them used the phone app that I mentioned earlier. The other ones we're not sure. They could have used the phone app or just crossed illegally. And the FBI got a sting operation going and just arrested all of them. And we don't have a whole lot more information about that case. They're sandbagging. But just a month ago, we had two Jordanians illegally present in the U.S. Conduct a vehicle ramming attack with a big box truck on Quantico Marine Corps base. One of them had just the month before in April of this year crossed the southern border from Mexico. He ends up over in the Washington, D.C. area, northern Virginia, doing some sort of a truck attack on a major military installation that also happens to be a big FBI training academy, very, you know, rich in targeting symbology, right? So.

We also have had a Russian cross the border and get caught up. He's from Chechnya area, get caught up in a major terrorism sting. He's sending thousands of dollars to an Al Qaeda group in Syria. The FBI said that they believe that he had they not arrested him in January of this year. I'm sorry. I think it was in 2022.

They arrested him that he would have gone kinetic or they thought he may go violent himself, operational, not just sending money. So we've seen 360 people from the Middle East who were already on the FBI's terrorism watch list cross our border. Biggest record by far that we've ever seen in numbers like that. In the book, America's Covert Border War, I point out in the entire first chapter that Europe suffered a series, an unending series of terror attacks from one end of the continent to the other, including in the UK, from immigrants that came in on the 2014-2015 mass migration wave. And I used that in my entire first chapter to warn that this could happen to the United States, were we to have a similar mass migration event. That book published in January, February 2021.

So it was a little early, just as this thing was getting started. But here we are.

Todd just to finish off can I ask you the solution to this mess and does aTrump administration coming in, does that fix it? Is this too big? has this are there too many people actually in the country and no knowledge of who they are, I mean what kind of is possibly the solution to the mass U.S. finds herself in?

I mean, I believe that the incoming humanity can be shut off in about 30 minutes. That's like as fast as they started it, they could end that by just simply pushing everybody back to Mexico. 100%. Everybody goes back to Mexico. That's what Trump was doing. That's why the numbers were so low at the end of the Trump term. So there's Remain in Mexico, there's policies where you can push people back and not let them apply for asylum. They can apply in Mexico. Mexico is a safe country or somewhere else.

Those are all doable. And nobody wants to spend $5,000 or $10,000 crossing if you know you're going to get pushed back. You're going to lose your money. It's that simple. It's literally that simple.

When I interview immigrants, that's what they tell me. Yeah, we waited until Trump was gone because we would have lost all our money. It's that simple. So it's a cost benefit ratio calculation that every smart immigrant makes, so that the numbers can go down. Now, it's a much steeper hill or mountain to climb to deport eight million people. That is something that the Trump campaign is promising to do. I believe that they will definitely get some kind of a monumental deportation program underway. They're going to take heat for that. There'll be political, there'll be lawsuits, there'll be all kinds of blowback. And so, but the important thing is that when people at home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, see that the administration is rounding up and wants to round up all Hondurans, they're going to stay home. Just the messaging of some of that is going to deter a lot.

And I also think that the administration probably will punish the NGOs and disrupt their flow of cash and remove the network of support that is so alluring for them. So it's, he may not be able to deport that many people in four years but he may not need to.

Todd I really appreciate you coming on, immigration is certainly the big topic, even here in the UK, and our election three weeks away as it is over with you for November, I think the best place is obviously the books, all the links in the description, people can follow you on Twitter, but I think certainly go to the website, toddbensman.com, and people can sign up to your newsletter. I think that's probably the best way of keeping in contact with the information you're putting out.

Yes, that's right.

Awesome.

Well, Todd, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your experiences on this huge issue.

Thank you, and good luck over there in Europe, a couple of years ago, they arrested five Tajikistanis there plotting to blow up US military installations in Germany.

Yeah, it's the same struggle we face all across the West, but thank you certainly for highlighting this.