Exclusive: Todd Bensman — Many of Joe Biden’s Migrants Die on Trek to U.S. Border

border - A forensics team bury a group of 15 migrants who died trying to cross the Darien
AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco
Neil Munro

Many migrants are being killed or brutalized on the global smuggling route created by President Joe Biden and border chief Alejandro Mayorkas, says Todd Bensman, a former intelligence official who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies.

“A lot of people are dying,” Bensman told Breitbart News from the town of Tapachula in southern Mexico:

I’ve been hanging out with Africans for the last two days — Senegalese, Ghanaians, Nigerians — and all had to come through the Darien Gap [the jungle between South American and Central America where] they saw body after body rotting on the side of the trail. “There are corpses rotting everywhere” – I’ve heard stories like that for two years straight from the Darien Gap.

One group of Africans said their friend was shot in the chest by bandits on the trail because he could not offer them any cash, said Bensman, who tweeted a video of the conversation:

“That guy died for no other reason than [Biden and Mayorkas] opened the border… [Without the U.S. border welcome] he’d be alive today — in Senegal — but he’d be alive,” Bensman said.

“They said they were coming because of Joe Biden,” Bensman said, adding that Biden and his deputies “are absolutely culpable for the deaths and killings, and they’re doing it under the guise that their decisions are rooted in humanitarian impulses.”

The Darien Gap is a rough trail over the mountains between Columbia and Panama. Many people — especially women — die along the trail.

Migrants, most from Haiti, pause during a rest on their trek through the infamous Darien Gap on their journey towards the United States on October 05, 2021 near Acandi, Colombia. The passage through the mountainous rainforest can take up to a week and is considered the most dangerous stretch for migrants traveling from South America to the U.S. During the trip, torrential downpours lead to sudden river floodings, often resulting in migrant drownings along the way. Reports of robberies and rapes from armed gangs are common, especially after migrants pass the remote mountain border crossing from Colombia into Panama. More than 70,000 migrants have traveled through the Darien Gap this year, according to Panamanian authorities. Most of the migrants in recent months have been Haitians, many of whom had been living in Chile and Brazil since the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The Darien Gap is the 66-mile stretch of rainforest between North and South America where the Panamerican Highway was never completed due to severe terrain, enormous cost, and myriad environmental concerns. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Migrants, most from Haiti, rest on their trek through the infamous Darien Gap on their journey towards the United States on October 05, 2021, near Acandi, Colombia. (John Moore/Getty)

“There are more vultures out there than I’ve seen in anywhere in the world,” journalist Michael Yon told a December 7 meeting arranged by the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:

We think about 10 percent of the people that go through [the Darien Gap jungle] die. There’s no way for us to know the true numbers, because we don’t know how many leave [Columbia] and we don’t know how many actually come out through [into Panama].

But after being down there for months, and interviewing just tons of people — hundreds — I’m going to guess 10 percent die out there. And if 100,000 people came through this year, that’s 10,000 people [dead].

So you can imagine how much those vultures have to eat. And I’m not sure if that’s why the vultures are there. But it’s a strange amount of vultures.

Hundreds of migrants have also died in U.S. scrubland after they sneak past U.S. border guards to reach the welcomes offered by U.S. employers and progressives. On January 5, Breitbart News reported:

The International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrant Program reports that 658 migrants are known to have died or gone missing in the U.S.-Mexico Border region during 2021. This is up from 476 (37 percent) during the final year of the Trump administration.

Progressives are willing to record and lament some of the deaths and violence — but only when they can shift the blame from their loose-border policies to the roughly 250 million Americans who wish to preserve their own country from many millions of poor migrants.

For example, WOLA, a pro-migration group, issued a January 18 report on Biden’s policies that ignored the deaths in the Darien Gap. Instead, it complained about “U.S. border law enforcement agencies’ culture of tolerating and normalizing cruel behavior …  amid grisly reports of migrants maimed or killed after falling off the [Trumb border wall] structure.’

Similarly, The New Yorker posted a January 18 article that blames President Donald Trump’s popular border barriers for the harm done to migrants on their trek to the U.S. border, saying:

Kidnappings were recurrent at the [migrant] camp [in Mexico]. Men preyed on young girls, promising to give them food if they followed them to an adjacent street. A local N.G.O. has recorded at least twenty instances of rape in recent months.

The article described the claimed dangers as it credulously reported on one migrant named Dolores who insisted that criminal gangs in El Salvador extorted money from her until she and her daughter left to join her husband and two sons already living illegally in the United States. But the article noted that her husband:

… who was already living in Virginia with their two sons, helped make last-minute arrangements [witth the for-hire coyotes]. Dolores and Rosalba, who asked that their names be changed, paid more than seven thousand dollars to traffickers, who smuggled them across the border; ending up in Reynosa was never part of the plan. Dolores was unaware that northeastern Mexico was one of the country’s most dangerous regions—it was her first time travelling outside El Salvador. But that reality quickly became apparent to her and Rosalba …

So Dolores simply sent her daughter over the border via the border-bypass route — the “Unaccompanied Alien Child” program — which allows Biden’s deputies to welcome and relay the child to her father, gratis:

In November, she considered having Rosalba cross the river on her own, hoping that she would be reunited with her father …  Some families who could still afford a smuggler were sending children across the border alone as a last resort. “She was detained by Border Patrol, but, thank God, she is already there,” Dolores said, with mixed relief.

The article did not mention if the gang extortion sought to extract dollar payments from the father’s earnings in the United States — which is enabled by progressives’ opposition to the deportation of illegal migrants.

Deep in the New Yorker article, the reporter also acknowledged that the Biden administration triggered the brutality.

The article said that “a senior official who served in the Biden Administration” told her that Mexican officials warned Biden’s reckless deputies to be careful:

One of the things that they had consistently told us—when they saw that Biden had won [the 2020 election], and obviously saw that there was likely going to be a reversal of some, if not many, of the policies—was, ‘Go slow.’ Because they feared what ultimately ended up happening, which was a large rush of people through their country to reach the United States.

Biden’s deputies and their establishment media allies have ignored the deaths caused by their favored policies.

“Justice is our priority,” Mayorkas declared in a November hearing, adding, “That includes securing our border and providing relief to those [migrants] who qualify for it under our laws.”

The migrants are being rational as they use Mayorkas’ welcome as they try to leap from their poor, crowded, corrupt, and backward home countries into the efficient and wealthy United States.

Yet Americans are also being rational when they demand the federal government enforce the laws and exclude waves of poor migrants from swamping their labor markets, housing markets, schools, and politics.

But multiple administrations have undermined Americans’ border laws since the 1980s because they wanted to extract people from poor countries to serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.

Migrants who are part of a caravan heading north, cheer after passing a checkpoint along the Huehuetan highway, Chiapas state, Mexico, September 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

Migrants who are part of a caravan heading north, cheer after passing a checkpoint along the Huehuetan highway, Chiapas state, Mexico, September 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

That economic strategy of extraction migration has no limits. It is harmful to ordinary Americans: It cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs.

The government-managed legal and illegal migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shifts wealth from children to parents,  and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the GOP’s heartland states.

The elite-driven economic policy shrinks Americans’ political clout, it radicalizes their democratic civic culture , and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

 

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