Host: The president has come up with a new pick to head the Border Patrol and he stays in law enforcement and he goes with the police chief of Tucson, Arizona, and his name is Chris Magnus. At first glance, you go, ‘okay, Tucson police chief, surely he knows what’s going on down there. Todd, give us some sense as to what we can expect from this new head of Customs and Border Patrol.
Bensman: “Sure, well my first take on this selection is that they picked a person who is utterly hostile to the idea of immigration enforcement and to the mission of the agency that he is taking over, Customs and Border Protection. That’s a primary enforcement arm for immigration and also the largest police agency in the country. We know this because, while he was police chief, he made it very well known that he was in support of sanctuary cities and in breaking any collaborative bond that his agency might have with Border Patrol or ICE or any of the immigration enforcement arms of federal government. This is a guy who made it known, in an op-ed for the New York Times, that illegal immigrants should be left alone and that police had no business collaborating with immigration enforcement. He very visibly carried a Black Lives Matter poster at a demonstration, Black Lives Matter of course being severely anti-police, calling for violence against police and the rest of that sort of thing. The Tucson city council and manager, which hired him initially back in 2015 after the Ferguson riots … are very well known as politically liberal, progressive left, the left side of the political spectrum. And that’s why they hired him. He’s made it well known what he’s all about. So it’s very natural that the Biden administration would want to select someone like him to lead an agency that it doesn’t really want to be doing any sort of border enforcement.
Host: Well we’ve got the border problem solved right there. Why don’t we just tell all the immigrants, ‘listen, just come on in. You’re welcome in Arizona.’
Bensman: Well, we have. We have said that. The Biden administration, all throughout the campaign, put forth an immigration agenda that talked about how it would be welcoming and would enable immigrants to enter through the border and stay and apply for asylum. And after election said it even more, you know, no child would be left in Mexico. All children would be brought in. So of course you have lots and lots of children being smuggled up and over the border. And family units, the vast majority of which are waved right through. They take selfies and send all that back home. And that sparks much more of the same. And then the administration ended almost all deportations. They gutted ICE, and ended deportations so everybody knows when they get across and into the interior of the United States, nobody is going to make them leave. Not under this administration. Which is the meat and potatoes of the definition open borders.