Excerpt:
Ed Martin: The apprehension numbers are at a historic level. Tell us about it.
Bensman: The numbers are preliminary. The government hasn’t fully vetted them yet. But for the month of July, it was 210,000 apprehensions. That’s by Border Patrol and some also at the Ports of Entry. This is a very big number. It finally broke over 200,000 people in one month. That’s about 6,700 people a day, each day of July. This is going to be 80,000 families, people in family units and about 20,000 unaccompanied minors. Those are all records. Every month, we are breaking new records in volume, in encounters. That puts us truly in the red zone. This puts us fully out of control now. The Border Patrol all along the Texas border, in several different sectors, are no longer able to do even their basic jobs. They are absolutely sucked into the vortex of processing these families and children, and the rest of the border is pretty much wide open except for what the Texas Department of Public Safety, state troopers, can do.
Ed Martin: If that’s happening… that’s apprehensions. If you’ve got 200,000 interactions with people… that’s not everything on the border. So does anybody even guess what the number of other people coming across is?
Bensman: Yes. There is some art, more art than science, to how many are getting through. But the unofficial number that’s been shared with me is 37,000 more immigrants who have gotten through without any sort of interaction. That’s going to be a really low number. The month before it was 50,000 and the month before that 60,000. It’s not that the number is falling; it’s that Border Patrol agents who report that number are not in a position anymore to report them. My best informed guess is that agents are unable to calculate and then file the reports to their own intelligence people. But in any case, they were able to calculate that 40,000 got through, from footprints and surveillance cameras and helicopter sightings and that sort of thing, of people who didn’t get caught. They’re called “got-aways.”
Ed Martin: This feels like it’s out of control. Is it truly out of control?
Bensman: Well, I try to stay away from hyperbole. But man, I gotta tell you, it’s just out of control. It’s not like anything…. I have Border Patrol agents call me. I have CBP officers call, just to talk about what they’re seeing. I had one call me last night to tell me about 600 immigrants, groups of immigrants coming over at one time, just swarm over. Five hundred at a time. Five hundred Haitians a week or two ago, a few nights ago… It’s unheard of. We haven’t seen anything like this. And the Border Patrol agents I talk to say, ‘we’re not even doing our jobs. Nobody is on the border. Nobody is there anymore. Because they are being diverted to babysitting duties and processing duty because the administration is letting all these people in. We had 80,000 – 80,000! – family group members got processed into the country in one month.
Ed Martin: Wow.
Bensman: That’s a lot of people. These Border Patrol agents are usually… they might handle a dozen, a baker’s dozen in the old days, and now it’s just all night long, all day long. And they are exhausted. They’re getting sick from covid. There is no effective control right now along large swaths of the Texas border, according to the people I talk to. And I’ve been down there a bunch of times this year. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve described it as a D-day type invasion with three or four rafts abreast in a row, crossing filled with migrants and crossing back and doing that all night long. It’s really something the American public, I think, has no idea how really crazy this is now. Off the charts.
Ed Martin: Todd, why isn’t it being covered? And I’m being serious, in this sense: it’s actually fairly dramatic. If you made a TV movie and you had families, and young women and you had minorities and you had old and young and you had rivers and all this. You had deserts and people dying… it should be dramatic story to cover. It’s not being covered really by anyone. And frankly, it’s not even being covered by FOX. What’s happening here?
Bensman: Fox news is down there. They’ve got this drone team down there, flying drones around. There is at least them. They are down there. And Newsmax goes down every once in a while. But it’s mostly conservative media down there. And that conservative media does not get to the broader US population of news consumers, especially not Democrats and liberal news consumers. And the reason – this is speculative of course but I think I’m right. I used to be a journalist. I did it for 23 years. I was a mainstream media guy… is that most reporters in this country are liberal, politically liberal. And this is a real Achilles heel for the Democrats and the Biden administration. They lost a presidency in 2016 over this issue. This is a really big issue, and the polling is terrible for the Biden administration on this issue. And I think they don’t want the American public to see it because it stoke anger and resentment, and it’s really outrageous what’s going on down there. I mean, it’s outrageous. These towns and cities down there are just filled with wandering immigrants. And runners. And chasers. And I mean it’s just crazy. The ranchers and the ranchlands in the interior … and busloads of migrants being loaded up all day and all night long for months on end being shipped to all corners of the United States. It’s areal phenomenon. It’s a real historic moment for the country, as far as I’m concerned.