daveman
Diamond Member
Bidenās āLa Invitacionā to Illegal Aliens Triggered Border Crisis, New Book Charges
Allen: I was really fascinated, for one, just by all the stories that you tell in the book āOverrun.ā I think itās pretty fascinating just everything that youāve experienced down there and you do such a good job of telling these stories. But one in particular that really struck me was that in 2021 you were on a reporting trip and you ended up actually interviewing a cartel member underneath a bridge at the edge of the Rio Grande. You tell this story and itās, quite frankly, pretty wild. What did you ask this cartel member when they agreed to let you interview them?Bensman: Well, first of all, I always avoid cartel people no matter what level they are. Thatās just a personal security code. You never know how things are going to go if you run into one of them, but that one just couldnāt be avoided. I ran into him, we spoke, we talked, and then I just learned that he was a smuggling guide for La Linea and he was on his vacation. He had just come back from guiding a big group over into Texas, West Texas, and before I could really figure things out, I was interviewing the guy.
And this was early on in the Biden border crisis. And the guy had for his vacation and his recreation, it was a wine and women sort of thing, except, actually, it was coke and women. He had his cocaine, he had a couple friends there, he had a couple of women there for hire, and thatās how he was doing his vacation under the bridge, drinking beer.
And at any rate, I asked him, āTo what do you owe this great prosperity?ā And this was amid a lot of debate inside the United States about who was causing this mass migration crisis. Root causes and complex interplays between hurricanes and corrupt governments and Haiti and all of these things. And he just came right out and said it. He called it āla invitacion.ā And I said, āWell, what do you mean by āla invitacionā?ā And he said, āWell, thatās the invitation that [President] Joe Biden issued to the entire world to come now because the doors open. āWeāre going to open the door to you.'ā
And he laid out a couple of policies that he knew about, that they all knew about, which at that point was the elimination of all deportation from the American interior, which was a big deal for him and his business because his people were all runners that were trying to get away from Border Patrol, paying $10,000, $12,000 ahead to get into the American interior to take advantage of this no deportation policy, which persists to the present day.
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And we have good reporting from [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] intelligence, public reporting that their revenue moved from somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million a year for human smuggling to bring people over or to charge themāitās kind of a side hustleāto as high as $13 billion in that first year of 2021.
