Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, returned to the U.S. on Saturday after traveling to Tapachula, Mexico, to document the Mexican government’s holding of approximately 150,000 illegal migrants who are waiting to continue their journey to cross the U.S. southern border.
Tapachula is located in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border and the Pacific Ocean.
Bensman said the city is holding hundreds of thousands of migrants from nations all across the globe who have a collective goal of crossing the U.S. southern border after the November 5 general election.
The holding of migrants in southern Mexico, Bensman said, is part of a deal the Biden-Harris administration made with the Mexican government to decrease the number of border crossings to avoid negative press coverage leading up to the general election.
Bensman said while he was in Tapachula, he interviewed a publisher of a local newspaper who said the city’s resources have been “denuded” as a result of hosting hundreds of thousands of migrants.
“There’s no work, there’s no money, there’s no space to sleep or lodge so that makes for a tough situation. So the Mexicans are now escorting caravans that are forming in Tapachula to other cities in Chiapas, and then they’ll be stuck in those cities. It’s like a population transfer to spread the joy, I guess,” Bensman explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
During his five-day trip, Bensman said he also interviewed migrants “pretty much all day, every day,” noting that he met individuals from nations across the globe, including Iran, China, Vietnam, Togo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Armenia, and Cameroon.
Bensman said a majority of the migrants he interviewed said they are making their way to the U.S. to seek “economic opportunity,” however, he noted the never-ending risk of migrants entering the U.S. with bad intentions, including ties to terrorism.
“We’ve had more than 400 on the FBI terrorism watch list reach our border, that we know of, of about 2 million that got away clean without anybody catching them. So who knows how many are in that 2 million batch. Nobody says, ‘Yes, I’m a terrorist’, but there are people from countries that have terrorist organizations operating in them that are coming through all the time as well. So there is a risk of that sort of thing happening, obviously,” Bensman said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
