Monica Crowley Podcast, October 10, 2023
“We’re Next: Hamas Strikes Israel and Terrorism Comes For Us Through Biden’s Open Border” with guest Todd Bensman
(32:35)
MONICA CROWLEY: I’m absolutely delighted to welcome back to the show Todd Bensman to talk about … the national security threat posed by the Biden wide-open border.
Todd is the Center for Immigration Studies’ Senior National Security Fellow. He is also the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, and America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.
Before joining CIS in August of 2018, Todd led Homeland Security intelligence efforts [with the Texas Department of Public Safety] for nine years. […]
(33:50)
Todd, we’ve been talking about the national security implications of [the Biden administration’s] wide-open border. Can you talk to us about some hard data? […] You know, in the four years that Donald Trump was president there were only 11 known terror suspects, people who are on a terror watch list who were apprehended at the border. Eleven in four years. How many have we seen, that we know about, in the years that Biden has been president?
(34:22)
TODD BENSMAN: Right. It looks to be about 250 apprehensions of known or suspected terrorists at the border in the last 36 months. That, of course, is just beyond all known bounds for that category of immigrant. The government only in April of last year started publishing those numbers on the CBP dot gov website, of statistics. So it is a monthly number, it is an official number. That’s how we keep track of it.
It’s also not a very illuminating number. Because we don’t know the types of terrorist organizations or the nationalities. I will tell you that the Center for Immigration Studies has a FOIA request in for that data. We do plan to sue over it when they turn us down, and we do plan to one day get that to the American people.
But I will say that sources who are familiar with those numbers tell me that probably about on the order of sixty percent of them are Islamist terrorists, people who are coming from either Sunni areas or Shia areas in the Middle East. Iran, Hezbollah, Lebanon for the Shia, Syria, and Sunni for everywhere else.
And a good chunk of those are probably going to be people from FARC, the Colombian designated terrorist organization who are very well-known for slaughtering, bombing, killing, maiming, kidnapping, attacking, in Latin America, for many, many years. Terrible people, the FARC, coming over that border as well. They’re not all Islamists.
(36:40)
CROWLEY: So, we’ve got, I mean, there are millions […] who have come in. The official numbers here are anywhere from 6 to 8 million over the last three years since Biden came in and opened up the border, probably a low-ball estimate, and the numbers are probably much higher. But among those millions, the way the press and the left always couch this, and the Biden administration — these are refugees, these are people looking for a better life, these are families, these are mothers, with babies, and they just want to work and do the jobs Americans won’t do.
This is all patently false. This is outrageous propaganda and nonsense. And mixed into all of these millions are dire national security threats.
So, yes, you are correct, Todd, when you say that it’s not just Islamic terrorists, but we’re focused on that now because of what we saw in Israel, and what we experienced on 9/11, that the Islamists, when they go for it, when they attack, they attack in the most spectacularly horrific kinds of ways. They like to put on a show. They like to kill as many people as possible with a well thought-out, strategically planned and well-funded attack.
(37:55)
So, the fact that we have God knows how many Islamic terrorists who have come across the border is a very serious issue for the United States, is it not?
BENSMAN: Right. Well, liberals will say things like, well at least we caught those 250, they were apprehended, so it shows that we’re really good, they’re not getting in. But what they’re not saying is that we’ve had probably close to two million illegal immigrants cross the border and completely get away into the interior without being detected or apprehended. That number, that two million number is absolutely the largest number in U.S. history. Really, incredible numbers just pouring through and getting right through into the interior.
That’s the national security threat, there. Because we have no idea. We caught maybe 250 on the terror watch list, but who knows how many got through. I’d bet paychecks that many got through. That is a national security threat on its face. I don’t know who could possibly ignore that threat.
Except, I can tell you this. Last month I was invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, a subcommittee of that, about terrorists who travel over the southern border, and whenever it came time for me to testify the whole half of the Democratic room, on the Democratic side, pushed away from the dais and were studying their Facebook and TikTok, and were ignoring those of us who were speaking about this issue.
(39:49)
And I pray that nothing like what you’ve described happens from those coming over the border. But if it does, that’s going to be one of the reasons why — because half of our leadership and lawmakers will not take this seriously.
Maybe, it’s like, the Israeli’s didn’t take hang-gliders seriously. They’ve never used hang-gliders before, so they never will. It’s beyond the realm of imagination. Except that border infiltration is not. I’ve written an entire book about this, called America’s Covert Border War, and, in it, I detail case after case after case of real terrorists who cross that border, got caught. They had plots, they were thwarted and deported.
And those were done by virtue of counterterrorism programs that are now totally collapsed. That are completely unviable now because of this mass-migration crisis, which is what I testified to last month to Congress.
(41:00)
CROWLEY: […] This is just an epic and catastrophic Trojan horse. And we have invited the enemy in, by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions. The enemy is within. And I fear the worst. We were not paying attention prior to 9/11, our focus was on other things. But post-9/11, there is no excuse for not staying on top of this kind of Islamic terror threat, here, to the homeland.
We developed an entire new department called the Department of Homeland Security. On top of having hundreds of billions going into our intel agencies — what are they doing? […] They’re filing their nails, while you’re trying to raise the alarm with the facts and the data. […]
(42:42)
BENSMAN: We definitely have seen, and have been reminded again, just how imaginative, tactically, and how resourceful these groups can be. There is this idea out there that they would never cross the border, there’s all these other ways — it’s just dismissed.
But I will tell you this. There is a Muslim-only migrant shelter that went up in April of 2022 in Tijuana, within sight of the wall, on the Tijuana side. I visited this Muslims-only shelter in Tijuana in November of 2022 to investigate it from a national security perspective. I met Chechens, Uzbekistanis, Tajikistanis, there were Afghans going through there, there were Somalis, and Syrians, people from all over the Muslim world arriving in Mexico, making their way to this facility which then would help them get across the border, either through CBP One or, you know, however they wanted to go across illegally.
(44:12)
By the time I got around to talking to the director of this shelter, a woman, who is a Muslim convert, she was very cooperative with me, and I asked, have you ever been contacted by U.S. intelligence or law enforcement about any of the people coming through here, and she said, never, not once.
And I said, well, what about the Mexican intel. And she said, no, they’re not interested at all. We have to call them when we find a problematic jihadist in our midst, and we have done that several times. Then they will do it, but they’re not being proactive. Either side.
(45:00)
And what that tells me is that just confirms that America’s covert border war, these programs, that I reveal in the book by that name, are completely unviable. They’re not doing the programs any more that kept us safe.
Just a few years ago, U.S. intelligence would have been all over a place like this, where there’s a concentration of what they call Special Interest Aliens. That mosque-migrant shelter is still in full bore operation right now, and I have no idea if we’ve paid any attention to it at all, I’m told not.
(45:40)
CROWLEY: Unbelievable. It’s just unbelievable. And when the inevitable happens, and there is a catastrophic attack in this country that will make 9/11 look like child’s play, everybody is going to run around wringing their hands, how could this happen …. You can see the train coming down the track, and nobody in our quote-unquote government, Todd, is lifting one finger to stop it. In fact, the contrary, they are encouraging this by keeping the border and inviting all of these people in.
(46:23)
BENSMAN: Right. There are some good reporters who report for conservative media outlets who are on the ground right now filming Syrians crossing, large numbers of Syrians, large numbers of Egyptians, Sudanese, people from Lebanon and Iraq, Bangladesh, from all over the Muslim world who are crossing in very significant numbers. I’ve met them myself — Mauritanians, Senegalese, recently I met my first Dagestanis, which is a Muslim majority country in the former Soviet Republic. My hotel in Matamoros was filled, every room, with Kyrgyzstanis, also a Muslim-majority nation with terrorist organizations who operate. Uzbekistanis. The whole world is marching into the country right now. […]
(47:31)
We don’t vet them, we can’t possibly vet an Afghan migrant because we can’t call the Taliban and ask them for an intel share. It doesn’t work like that. Or the Syrians, or any of those countries I just mentioned.
CROWLEY: So we’ve been focused on the Islamic terror national security threat, Todd, but there are other threats coming across the border. Of course we’ve got the cartels with operational control over our own border and they’re hosting all of these people there. But talk to us about the threat posed by the Chinese nationals coming across the border. […]
BENSMAN: My understanding is that we’re pushing more than 25,000 Chinese nationals reaching our border since October in the last year. We know from federal prosecutions in recent years that the Chinese government, the PLA has infiltrated — through lawful, legal visa means — spies into our most important research institutions — MIT, UCLA, lots of prosecutions that show us that this interest by the Chinese government to steal our research, our cutting-edge military research, and exfiltrate it all out.
I don’t think it takes a whole lot of imagination to regard this population that are coming over the border as very likely hiding or masking PLA operatives as well, spies coming in through the southern border. I think in the coming years we probably will see that.
(49:38)
A lot of them are military-aged men, single, and women. You know, women in China are also members of the PLA, and have been caught conducting influence operations and spying operations even on Capitol Hill, with this Eric Swalwell guy for example.
CROWLEY: And what about the late Diane Feinstein having a Chinese driver for 20 years?
BENSMAN: Yeah. I think that the porous southern border is exposing the country unnecessarily. I don’t want to say porous, it’s not porous. It’s just open. They opened all spigots, it’s just an open border. Let’s just call it, call it what it is.
Everybody who gets to our border, in one way or another, gets in. That’s why they’re coming. That’s why they’re coming in such vast numbers.
It’s impossible for Border Patrol or CBP to do much more than maybe run their names through a database — that they’re given — or maybe their fingerprints. But you can’t get a hit when you’re running them against blank databases…. There’s no vetting coming in.
(51:18)
We’ve mentioned spies and terrorists, but a lot of people don’t realize that we are also having immigrants coming in from every nation on the continent of Africa. I’ve met them all. A lot of those countries are absolutely riven by tribe-on-tribe atrocities, these terrible horrendous atrocities right out of the worst horror movie. And those people that are coming from those countries are not all victims of that. There are going to be perpetrators who are among them who are going to slide right into the country and take refuge from international justice. And that is just ethically and morally wrong. That is not in the U.S. national interests.
And I think we just have to keep in mind that it’s also African immigrants that are being brought in from Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and Cameroon, and Congo, and all of those places where just horrendous things are happening — and we don’t know who they are.
(52:25)
CROWLEY: Two points on that. First, a lot of the Hamas terrorists that we have seen in the footage coming out of Israel, these terrorists do not look traditionally Arab. They look like they’ve come from some of these places in Africa. And a lot of these places are Muslim-majority countries that you’re talking about.
The second and bigger point is that the people who are coming into this country have no investment in America. They aren’t familiar with our Constitution, and our values, and our culture — nor do they care. And, in many cases, not only do they not care, but they are literally at war with those things. Am I right?
(53:10)
BENSMAN: Yes, you’re right. There are going to be people like that. I personally believe, because I spend a lot of time with them, I think the majority are regular economic migrants. They’re coming to earn money for as long as they can, before we kick them out, or, most of them are here permanently, they’re never going to go.
But this is the ultimate stranger danger. Because I’ll go down there to the border, and I can, on the Mexican side, fill a shopping bag filled with discarded IDs and passports. The final thing that they did before they crossed in, to hide their identity or mask their identity and where they’ve been for the last five years.
It is the ultimate stranger danger. We have huge numbers of people coming in where we don’t really even know their names. […]
(54:12)
CROWLEY: We saw last week … people in the Biden administration talking about perhaps resurrecting parts of the border wall, and we’ve got to gain control over this, because you’ve got Democrats, now, in blue areas like Governor Kathy Hochul in New York, Governor Newsom in California, and the Illinois governor, Pritzker, they’re all talking about we can’t absorb any more, they’re trying to lean on Washington to stop the in-flow.
They didn’t care at all about the border states and border communities, when it was just restricted to those locations. But now that they’ve got to deal with it, they’re putting pressure on the administration.
(54:50)
So we saw Mayorkas come out and say, yeah we’re gonna do that — and then they delete, they walked it back, and they’re saying, no, policy has not changed.
Where do you think we go from here? Does this just continue until January of 2025 when there is, hopefully, a new president?
(55:10)
BENSMAN: Well, I’m gonna tell you something that really just usually just pisses people off, but I’m just gonna say it, it’s what I think. I think that America, the America that doesn’t like this, is going to have to roll up into a fetal position and just take it, take the beating. For the next year or so, till the election. If a republican gets in, this can be ended in about 24 hours. But for the next year, it looks like this administration is going to keep those spigots on, wide open.
I want to tell you something about the September numbers, if I can, because this is important. The September numbers, — they should be released any day now — they’re going to show the largest number of illegal crossings in American history, and that’s saying a lot because we have broken that record about 20 times in the last three years. It’s just the latest record-breaking number, 280,000 I’m being told. We’ll see if that’s confirmed.
But that’s just the ones that are coming between the ports of entry, that Border Patrol get. But this administration has opened up what they call lawful pathways, which is to say that they are bringing them in with a, using a cell phone interface app, called CBP One. They’re bringing them in by the tens of thousands a month, on the land bridges, too.
You can’t see this. You don’t see this. And … they’re also authorizing travel from foreign countries to 43 American airports. I just got the records through a FOIA lawsuit for the Center for Immigration Studies. In the last year they brought in 221,000 that way, airport to airport, 43 different U.S. airports. I can’t get the names, they’re still withholding the names of those airports.
(57:27)
That, in addition to the runners and gotaways, means, by my calculations, that September — the real number that got in in September if you count the gotaways — may be pushing close to 400,000 in a single month.
October is going to be way worse, judging from what we’re seeing on the border right now, the numbers that are coming through, 14,000 a day, 12,000 a day. I can envision 500,000 a month, all the way through for another year. If it stays at those levels, there will be millions more people coming through in just the last year of the Biden term.
I’m not being hyperbolic, here. I’m telling you that we have a good bead on those CBP one interface numbers, where they’re letting them fly in by aircraft and bringing them over the bridges — in addition to the ones that are crossing between the ports and getting caught. It’s got to be close to 400,000 for September and it’s going to be way more in October.
And they love it. They like it, they want it to keep going. The most possible that they can get into the country in the next year, the better, from their point of view.
(58:58)
CROWLEY: Yes. This is all intentional, and it’s being done for a whole variety of political reasons. But the American people are the ones who are bearing the brunt of this. Everything from the national security threats — literally life and death — to the economic consequences, to the cultural consequences. This is beyond dangerous, this is beyond appalling. This is the loss of our country by our leadership in a deliberate manner.
And it is so evil. Evil really is the only way to describe all of this. […]
[1:00:23]
BENSMAN: I’ll leave you with a final thought. Those northern cities, ain’t seen nothing yet. They have seen nothing yet. This thing is just beginning. And those guys up there are not complaining about the right things. They’re asking for mops to clean up the flood, not that somebody go outside, honey, and turn the spigot off.
CROWLEY: Amen.