Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, delves into the national security threats stemming from Biden’s open borders, including potential ISIS sleeper cells in the U.S., the New Orleans terror attack, Trump’s plans to reinstate the “ungoverned country” travel ban, and the Mexican government’s role in facilitating Islamic terrorism.
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Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies in just a moment. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. They take it seriously, unlike the big players. So again, that’s four, number four, freedommobile.com today and check that out. Our next guest up is Todd Bensman.
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He is the senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and the author of Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in History, as well as America’s Covert Border War, the untold story of the nation’s battle to prevent jihadist infiltration. Thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the program, Todd Bensman.
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It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you. So, Todd, how many people have crossed the border who are on the terrorist watch list? And what data do we have of who’s trying to cross the border?
Bensman: More than 400 in the last three and a half years have crossed the border and were apprehended who were on the FBI’s terrorism watch list. That’s the number. That’s a historic number. We’ve never had anywhere near close to that number. But I would point out that we also have had more than 2 million illegal immigrants get away clean into the interior, never got caught at all.
So we have no idea really how many more might have been on the watch list that got through. And then we also know that the government accidentally, in the crush and chaos of the border, freed accidentally.
Bensman: At least 100 people who were on the FBI terrorism watch list had to scramble afterwards to go round them up before they could do something. So that’s a real problem. How does one get on the terrorist watch list? Can you explain that to our audience? I don’t think they realize how you get on that list. Yeah, there’s a threshold. The FBI or there are 17 intelligence agencies that can nominate a person to be on the watch list. They have to go through several layers of analysis to be approved by the FBI to be on the watch list, on the U.S. watch list. And typically, you have to have some sort of significant association with terrorism or people that are involved in terrorism directly or indirectly. But it’s not usually very lightly tangential. It’s going to be pretty solid. They’ve increased the threshold and the analysis that has to go into putting somebody on a watch list in recent years. And the watch list is not that big anymore like it used to be. The terrorist’s database, screening database. That’s what it’s called.
So if you’re on that list, that’s what FBI Director Wray said is a great cause for concern to the FBI if you’re on that list. How many ISIS cells do you believe are in the United States now? I have no idea on that. I used to be in the intel community. Typically,
Bensman: I wouldn’t say that they are cells in the way that we traditionally think, like the cells that did 9-11. More frequently now, they’re lone wolves or they’re people who are lone offenders or people that caught the virus, the ideological virus online and became true believers that way through the propaganda. Probably the guy who did the New Orleans attack. I don’t think he was directed from abroad. I think he probably just decided to do this on his own. But he probably had people that were egging him on and proselytizing him. If modern digital communications make those type of actors a little bit more dangerous – I apologize.
I’m throwing a larger question here. You only have a minute left. But modern digital communications make those kind of actors a lot more dangerous. And I want to talk when we come back about how easy it is for international jihadist organizations and individuals to stir up those type of lone wolf attacks and how much more common they have become in Europe. And whether the U.S. is facing that kind of future here. We also want to talk with you because you’ve been speaking out a little bit about how the Mexican government has facilitated Islamic terrorism in the United States…and for our show here being based out of Arizona and obviously airing in other states. That is a major concern going forward, that the actions of that government will not match the needs of the United States or the international community. So we’re going to talk about all of that with Todd Bensman when we come back here in just a moment, folks. Make sure you check us out, breakingbattlegrounds.vote, or wherever you like to download your favorite podcast. We’re on Substack, all that good stuff. If you download, you get that extra podcast segment at the end. So stay tuned. We’ll come back for more. This is Sam Stone for Breaking Battlegrounds.
Folks, welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. We’re going to be continuing on here in just a moment. Todd Bensman, he is the Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. Continuing on, Todd, right when we went to break, we’re talking about two issues.
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I want to start with the danger of these lone wolf actors and how much easier it is to both radicalize and activate them in the era of modern social media communications, all these other channels. Europe has had far more of these attacks than people realize. The U.S. may be facing a similar future. Extremely important. ISIS understands it. Al Qaeda understands it.
Bensman: All of those organizations understand that the social media and encrypted apps, sort of the dark web, places where people go to talk to jihad, are absolutely critical in inspiring and inciting people abroad to conduct attacks. I think that that’s what we’ll find here with the New Orleans guy. But every year in this country, we bust somebody, probably on a monthly basis, one, two, three every month, every year probably 20 or 30, who got radicalized online. We caught them before they could do anything. Either they were trying to go overseas, or they were sending money, or they were actually actively plotting to do something, and thank God the FBI got informants into the mix and put a stop to it. But the point is that the old-style cell structure that we were talking about earlier, those are easy to detect now. Too many people talking to too many people and buying equipment and things, there’s too many opportunities to get caught. And so just inspiring somebody, one guy online, presents far less detection possibilities. So that’s probably how this guy slipped through. When they do slip through, that’s usually what the back story is. They’re out there taking in all of this incitement propaganda and swallowing it and then acting on it. Let’s talk about President Trump’s famous travel ban, which everybody called the Muslim travel ban, which just wasn’t true.
Do you feel that President Trump will implement the travel ban again? And B, what do people not understand what it actually was?
Bensman: I do think he said he’s going to bring it back. I’ve written about the travel ban repeatedly. It’s not really a ban. It’s their visa restrictions. on certain countries. It is completely valid and legitimate and not at all the way it is portrayed. What the travel restrictions really are is it targets people from countries that have no government. They are unable to provide intelligence information back to us about whether they’re terrorists or criminals or something else terrible. Take Somalia, which had no government at all. Anybody born since 1990 didn’t even have a birth certificate or a driver’s license. There were no police. There was no record on anybody, whether they were involved in terrorism or whatever. You can’t just willy-nilly let Somalians get visas to come in here, or Yemenis, same thing, or Libyans, same thing. These are ungoverned spaces, and we can’t vet them. This is all about vetting. Can we vet them? Venezuela is hostile to us. Cuba is hostile to us. Syria was hostile to us and probably will be again. And you can’t just call them up and get an intel share. So the safe bet is to just say, look, we’re going to just sharply restrict visas to those kind of countries, hostile or incapable of helping us vet people who are applying for visas here. I think the original list of 13 needs to be greatly expanded when they bring it back. Who would you put on it? Who would you add to it? I would put Congo on it. I would put Afghanistan on it. The Israeli Occupied Territories…Oh, absolutely. I would put, yeah, there are a number of countries that, that are just simply hostile to us, ungovernable, that we didn’t put on the first list. And they don’t necessarily have to be Muslim. North Korea is on that list. There are a lot of other countries that need to be put on that list. Well, one thing that has to happen, and you’re very knowledgeable on this, so our audience today has probably learned more about this issue than they ever have, just besides what they hear on a clickbait headline by the New York Times.
What do people who want to have a controlled border, what do they need to do when he comes out and reintroduces his travel ban? He needs to add a few countries, obviously, like Afghanistan. What can people do to get this message out? Russia would be a good one as well. What can they do to get this message out?
Bensman: Well, you know, I’ve written about it in favorable, positive terms. You can go to my website and find my arguments. Toddbensman.com in favor of the restrictions. It’s not a Muslim travel ban either, by the way. It’s just simply an ungoverned country travel ban. Nothing wrong with that. It absolutely makes perfect sense. And you can read my arguments, and the administration’s arguments, when they come out with them, they lay it out. You can find court opinions that upheld it all the way to the Supreme Court and disseminate them and talk about them openly and argue back. It’s not what they’re saying it is. They’re just simply not right to call it a Muslim travel ban and a religious discrimination issue. It’s not. It’s a vetting issue. It’s a national security issue. Very legitimate security issue. And you’ve talked about something almost no one else has talked about in that regard is we had a person come across the border who was actually on the terror watch list come across illegally and engage in shooting Jewish people in Chicago, went on a shooting rampage, was taken down by the police, but nobody’s been talking about that. There’s no attention focused.
This is the type of person we’re talking about who we need to know who they are and not let them in.
Bensman: Yeah, I just returned from Chicago on that story because the perpetrator was a Mauritanian illegal border crosser, came over the Mexican border after a long journey, and they led him right through into San Diego, and he went to Chicago, and about a year and a half after going to Chicago, he conducts this horrendous, long-running, 20-minute gun battle terror attack for the jihad in a Jewish Chicago neighborhood, shoots a Jewish Orthodox man in the back. Thankfully, he survived, then opened fire on police and paramedics, tried to kill the guy again when they were loading him into the ambulance, et cetera. And they charged him with terrorism. The state of Illinois arrested and charged him with terrorism after seeing all the jihad propaganda on his cell phone. And then he hanged himself in his Cook County jail before he could go to trials. And get a lot of questions answered for the American public about how did he get in, and what did we do to vet that guy? So I’ve got a three-part series coming up next week with all my findings in it so far, and to just serve as a reminder to the public that this thing happened, that terrorists do cross the border. It has happened. There is one on the books now, Blood Was Drawn. First blood was drawn on this. And if we don’t really excavate and apply introspection to this case, how are we going to prevent the next one of these? There’s all kinds of people from Mauritania and all of those Muslim-majority countries who came in in record-breaking numbers and got right into the country without any vetting at all down at the border, and they’re here.
We’re with Todd Bensman. He is the senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. He also has a great book that came out in August, Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History. How would you define for our audience mass deportations? That’s what President Trump or incoming President Trump has talked about. How would you define it? Do you see them deporting up to a million people under his tenure or more? How would you define it? Well, anything that is greater than what they’re doing now and what they’ve been doing for the last four years could be called mass, because they all but eliminated any kind of significant deportations, interior deportations, in the United States to a historic degree. It’s never happened like that before. They just fell off the cliff. So this would really, the better way to put it is that this is just simply a return to normal law enforcement, immigration enforcement in the country. The problem with returning to normal is that the numbers that are deportable are absolutely wicked sky high. We have never seen anything like, so the number of deportations has to go up in order to reverse the damage done to move people like that Mauritanian terror attacker out of the country …you know, all these criminals that are just running around that we know are running around. And I think they can do a million a year. Obama did a million a year. during his term in office.
The issue with Tren de Aragua highlights another problem with this that you’ve been talking about and I’ve seen almost no one else. We’ve talked about it in the past on this program. But the Mexican government is essentially now complicit with the cartels in their border operations. They make no attempt to stop them. They are explicitly their friends.
Bensman: And that is opening us up in a way that has never been before to this type of terrorist and violent criminal infiltration. Well, yes, I have spoken about that quite a bit there. We have a Mexican cartel problem. They control the Mexican side of large areas of the southern border, our southern border. They control all the approaches the smuggling lanes north. And with that, the Mexican government has just sort of seeded the battleground. And they did it a long time ago, years ago, since the Calderon government administration, when they declared war on the cartels and actually set the military on them. They lost that war because of a lack of, I guess, commitment. You know, there were a lot of casualties in that war. And, you know, I argue that, you know, we need to see to it that Mexico maybe resumes that war. They have a policy called hugs, not bullets. That’s the official name of their policy toward the cartels. Like what? Who has a policy like that? And so I argue that, you know, they should be made To have a policy of bullets, not hugs, from now on, there has to be pressure on them. Now, I do want to just point out that it is in the Mexican interest to have a policy like that because they would otherwise be stuck with mass numbers of migrants in their country. They want those migrants to move out of their country and into ours. It’s in their interest to do that. They don’t want to get stuck with millions of people, foreign nationals, because who does? What country in their right mind anywhere in the world wants that, except the United States under Joe Biden? They were perfectly fine with it in some European countries. So it’s the policies of the United States that enabled the Mexicans to push them all through, millions of people. Trump’s going to end that. And when Trump does in that, the Mexicans are going to have to get on board with this and do something about those cartels, put their military out there, keep their military interdicting the migrants as they try to cross our border. And if they don’t, they may be hit with big tariffs. And big tariffs. And frankly, the U.S. needs to consider direct action against the cartels.
Thank you so much, Todd Bensman. We really appreciate having you on the program, folks. You can follow him on X @BensmanTodd and read his work at ToddBensman.com. Breaking Battlegrounds is coming back on the air next week. But download the podcast. Get that extra segment.
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