➡ Chris Farrell hosts a podcast called “On Watch” by Judicial Watch covering often overlooked news events. In one episode he features Todd Benzman from the Center for Immigration Studies, an expert on border security and the immigration crisis, who discusses the challenges at the southern border and the surge of immigrants entering the U.S., both legally and illegally, since the Biden administration’s regulatory changes in immigration policy.
➡ The text broadly covers the issues related to migrants, including national security threats and the humanitarian crisis, emphasizing how the majority are military age males. It highlights the lack of acknowledgment by the feminist movement on women being exploited and trafficked. Besides, it points out policies allowing people to migrate carry risks as they encourage life-threatening journeys. Finally, the text turns towards a specific illegal immigrant community in Liberty County, Texas, “Colony Ridge,” which has been developed into an illegal immigration ecosystem. The area, dominated by crime and violence, is now the focus of a concerted law enforcement crackdown.
➡ The Texas Department of Public Safety conducted an unusual operation to regain control of a 170-acre island, Fronton, which had fallen under the control of two cartels operating from the Mexican side. Texas authorities discovered that the entire island is north of the international boundary, allowing Texas Rangers and U.S. soldiers to launch an operation against the cartels who had been causing disturbances and trafficking drugs.

I’m Chris Farrell, and this is on watch. Welcome to On Watch, everybody, the Judicial Watch podcast, where we take a deep dive behind the headlines to cover stuff the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know about, where we try to recover some lost history, try to describe the inexplicable and cover news stories that really you need to know more. And that’s why we’re here to do it on Watch.

Today, I got a real treat for you. We’ve got somebody who knows the real deal when it comes to our southern border, the security crisis around that, the immigration crisis. We’re going to be joined by Todd Benzman from the center for Immigration Studies. Before Todd joins us, though, I want to encourage you. Whether you’re watching this on YouTube or Rumble, or whether you’re listening to the audio version of this podcast, please be sure to subscribe to leave us a rating and also via the Judicial Watch platform, communicate with us.

Let us know what you’re interested in, what you like, what you want to see covered. We really appreciate your commentary and your insights as well. So thank you for joining us on Watch, and I’m very pleased right now to introduce to you the Senior National Security Fellow for the center for Immigration Studies, and that is our good friend Tod Benzman. Welcome, Tod. Hi, thank you for having me.

I appreciate a you’re also the author of a book called Overrun, and that’s really what we’re dealing with. The United States. We went from a crisis to I don’t know how to describe it anymore. How do you do a superlative of how bad, how horrific the situation is on our southern border. You know, you’ve been there, you’ve spent tons of time, effort, blood, sweat and tears on the border.

Tod, give me just sort of an overview. What do you think our status is right now? Well, I’m still trying to come up with a good superlative for that mean, I haven’t I mean, I guess the best way to put it is that we’ve been at historic levels of mass migration for the nation for three years straight, but we now have a historic mass migration cris within the mass migration crisis.

Just shot full of steroids, this thing. What’s going on down there? And I guess probably we should say that this should not be a surprise because for about a year leading up to this, the US. Intelligence community has been predicting. And the Biden administration has accepted those predictions and had built that into their policy strategy cake, if you will, all the way up until the end of Title 42.

That the intelligence community, the Biden administration, us, you, everybody was saying that there was going to be this incredible human wave come over that border after Title 42. And this is it. This is that wave that was predicted. This is what they said would happen. The numbers are right in there. The intelligence community was saying anywhere from 12,000 to as high as 18,000 a day. Right. We’re well in a 12,000 range.

14,000 range. We’ve had 14,000 days. And I think that the intelligence community is going to be right about the upper range very soon, too. 18,000 a day. This thing is going nowhere but 90 degrees up. I try to explain it to people and say, look, a conservative ballpark estimate is that since the Biden administration kicked the door open about and this is a load ball number, in my opinion, about 7 million people have entered the country.

And so what does that mean? That’s virginia, right. That is the population of the state of Virginia. That is the revised post COVID population of the New York metropolitan area. We have imported an entire state or one metropolis worth of people. And I’m not sure what your estimate is. Maybe you say ten or 12 million. I’m not sure what’s your guess on what the total is? Well, over at the center and for me, we come in a little bit lower than 7 million.

We figure that there are probably about 4. 8 pushing 5 million that have actually entered the country. And we take the conservative I mean, it could very well be a lot more than that. I’m going to just tell you that because of the runners gotaways, the gotaway numbers, which are notoriously hard to pin down, but I tend to like to go with the lower numbers. And we think that there are probably about 1.

8 million that have gotten away undetected footprints in the sand. Sure, I think that it’s a lot higher than that because there are fewer border patrol agents out there to count footprints in sand. They’re all in the processing stations, not out there. And I don’t think anybody’s counting the way they should. But even at these lower counting for the Gotaways, they’re still really high, 50, 60, 70,000 a month coming through.

But I’m telling you, I’ve done reporting on this. The deserts are just absolutely riven with, know, traveling all these trails all through New Mexico and Arizona and California getting through. I don’t think people really I mean, that is what is not reported. People see imagery, no matter how you consume your news, people see imagery from border crossing, the ports of entry or areas near there, and it’s essentially people surrendering themselves saying, hey, me too, I want to get in.

And they’re processed. There’s so many others that get across in between. Right. There’s another problem, too, and that is that this administration created what they call their terminology lawful pathways, which is to say that they just created, outside of the authority of Congress, multiple other ways that immigrants can be legally. Quote I put that in big air quotes big, giant in bold typeface 32 pathways into the country where they’re handing out entry permits at the border ports, right at the ports of entry.

And they’re also flying them in from foreign airports directly into US. Airports by the hundreds of thousands. And that right there, I don’t think we should pause and kind of rewind and make sure that our viewers and listeners understand the Biden administration is allowing persons to enter the country. I mean, essentially they’re illegal aliens. I know it’s an antiquated term, but that’s what they are. But they’re doing it in a quote unquote lawful way, whatever that means.

Not at the border, not running across the desert. They’re announcing themselves and they’re flying into the country. Give a little more resolution, a little more detail on that. How do they do that? Well, the way that works, and I just published, I think the week before last, a piece based on our FOIA litigation. We have been over at the center, have been battling the administration for these numbers.

We are in litigation now, but through that we have eked out a few nuggets of information about the flight program. They have shown us documents to say that since January or actually October, about one year now for just four nationalities cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians that they have flown 221,000 directly into 43 airports in the United States from not in Mexico, but beyond Mexico, like in South America and Central America.

We are still litigating. They won’t tell us which airports. They’re claiming that there’s a law enforcement exemption, which is just absurd. Our lawyers are handling this, but soon we hope to be able to show that thousands of these are being flown into JFK, that those immigrants are not all being bust up by Greg Abbot, they’re being flown in by Joe Biden. And also we believe that they are probably being flown in by the many, many tens of thousands into Miami international DeSantis state, but also dozens of other airports.

But I just want to point out that they only gave us four nationalities. There are also Colombians that they didn’t give us that are on the approved nationality list for the flights and Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans for the flights as well because they just don’t want big congregations at the physical land border. It looks bad when Bill Malusian over at Fox News flies his drone over it. Right.

They came up with this to kind of like nobody can see this, but in addition to the flights, they’ve also been bringing every possible nationality over the land bridges, over the ports. They’re not telling us they still are battling us on those numbers. We think there’s somewhere in the order of if there’s 30,000 a month being flown in of just those nationalities, we think that there are probably 50 or 60 or 70,000 more a month being brought in over the land bridges for probably a total of 100,000.

I’m just spitballing here, but sure, I think it’s kind of an educated guess, and if that’s the case, the 280,000 that we know are crossing illegally between the ports, you should be able to tack 100,000 more on that from the CBP One apps, the Ins and the border thing. Sir, we may be looking at a 400,000 a month for just September. And wait till you see October. It is insane down there.

I’ve marched along with the caravanners in Guatemala back in 2018 and people were hysterical then. But we decided rather than to sit, as you have very famously and very courageously done, you just don’t sit in an office and talk about it, you go and do it right, you’re on the ground. So we had walked along in Guatemala marching with caravanners, and I’ve tried to explain to people that while the television shows crying women and children, there are crying women and children, but that’s like a tiny percentage that overwhelmingly pick a number.

95%. 97% are military age males. Right? 15 to 50, marching along back in the caravan days through Guatemala. But also at all these crossing points. And so you can’t disrespect or you can’t discount the women and children involved in this process because it is horrendous and they are the most vulnerable. But there’s an enormous amount of young, healthy, like I say, military age males just storming in with these crowds of people.

So two things there one, that’s obviously a national security threat for a variety of reasons. But number two, where’s the feminists? Where are the women, the strong, intelligent, articulate women who would like to defend the women who are being exploited and trafficked across that border? Where is the feminist movement? Where is the vocal opposition to the abuse of women in this process? Well, they’re in the Democratic Party coalition, so they’re just not going to say a word about any of just this thing falls squarely on our partisan divide.

I mean, the way a lot of people, maybe half the country would look at this is that if you have policies that are letting people in, you are going to invite the entire world in who, when they see that, also want to be let in. And when they see that and decide that they are going to be let in too, they’re taking risks. So the policies are drawing people to put their lives at risk and they are dying on the way, lots of them.

We just got the UN, I think it was just named our border the most dangerous in the world. Is anybody surprised by that? Of course not. I mean, we have policies that are drawing people in. The other side would look at that and say, well, if you would just let everybody in, bring them in, fly them in, bring them in over the bridges, do all this kind of thing, then they won’t have to be very risky.

They can just let everybody in. And if you block anybody, they take risks when you block them, that kind of thing. But I would contend that none of that’s true because you can stay in your home country and apply for one of these CBP, one family reunification visas in your home country. And if you wait long enough you can get an airline ticket and fly right in. There are probably four or five different ways that anybody out there in the entire world can just get in without very many bars.

There’s a unique situation in Liberty County, Texas, about 30 miles north of Houston. There’s a place called Colony Ridge, and there’s been some coverage of it, there’s been some discussion, depends on how closely you look at the border issue. But this really, I think, is sort of a unique phenomenon because what we’ve created is an illegal immigration kind of ecosystem together in one spot outside of a major US.

City. And you may hear Eric Adams screaming in New York about his inability to cope with illegal immigration. But Texas has its own unique kind of subculture ecosystem. Talk to us about Colony Ridge. What is it and what’s going on there? That’s a good way to put it as an ecosystem. It is definitely its own ecosystem, like almost a hermetic kind of ball around it, but a plastic bubble around it rather.

This is a community that covers about 60 sq mi in Liberty County, Texas, a county that used to just be nothing but forest and a couple of little tiny towns inside that forest. And about ten years ago a developer figured out that there was a demand and no laws against him selling plots of land to illegal immigrants if he owner financed it to them at high interest rates.

And he found there was a great market for it. And people came in from all over the United States, from across the border and everywhere else to get in on this land deal. And today there may be, we think nobody really knows, maybe as much as 75,000 people living there. And when you go there and you talk to the police and the school superintendent and the firefighters and the people that live there, they’ll tell you that including the people who live there, that almost everybody there is an illegal immigrant.

Or maybe they have some kind of documents recently since they moved in they were illegal or now they were legal, but now they’re illegal. They kind of shift in between legal and illegal and that sort of thing. And this thing grew up in the absence, I think, of very much federal law enforcement or even much local law enforcement. And so instead of otis turning himself into the jail, opening up the jail cell in andy griffiths, which is how it used to be over there, you have a lot of really heinous crime, people getting shot to death.

All over and drugs and kilos of coke and massacre of a honduran family and a couple of maids chained to a bed and killed and just not Otis anymore. And according to the local sheriffs, there are four cartels that have taken root there and are operating and doing sex trafficking and all kinds of heinous stuff and there’s no cops around. So that’s kind of what that’s about. Now, in fairness, the owner, the developer, the Harris family, they are disputing all of these facts that it’s a no go zone.

They’re disputing that it’s a majority illegal immigration. They have a lot of interest in doing that because recently Greg Abbot announced that two things. One is that that’s our Republican governor here in Texas. One is that he is going to make this the subject of a special legislative session to come up with solutions. We don’t know what that means at this point, but he said we are going to have a special session because our legislature in Texas has every two years, right.

And it just so. But the governor can call special sessions for unfinished business. The other thing that he did was he ordered a major Texas Department of Public Safety surge into the community that started today where you have 60 or 70 different patrol cars now absolutely saturating the community starting today. And CID, investigative agents, intelligence resources. I mean, they’re going to town over there and I think that the land developer and maybe some of the people that live there or maybe potential buyers who are thinking about, well, maybe this is a great place to live.

No law enforcement sweats us here. Might reconsider that, purchase, that sort of thing. So they’re fighting back and they’re making factual claims that the other factual claims are incorrect. But I don’t know. We’ll see what happens with all that. Yeah, it’s something to watch definitely. It’s a crazy situation, a crazy story. And whether you look at it through the immigration lens or not, the amount of violence and criminality in the community merits attention all by itself, regardless of whatever the person’s legal status is to be in the country or not.

When there’s crimes of violence, when there’s loss of life and property, they got to look at it whether they want to or not. Yeah. And the local police, they’re the local police, but they may have like two or three regular street officers on patrol for 75,000 people on any one shift. And it’s all they can do to just stay up with broken taillights and calls for domestic violence and whatever.

And given the current situation in law enforcement, there’s an awful lot of police officers that are going to stay in the cruiser, right? They’re not going to get out of the vehicle unless there’s some horrific crime of violence committed practically right in front of them because everyone’s got a cell phone. And you get out of the car and you start engaging with somebody locally, all of a sudden you’ve got a crowd of 1520 people around you screaming at you.

And there’s officers who are just going to say, you know what, it’s not worth know unless there’s something really heinous going on. I’m not getting out of the car. Well, at least on this score, I think that the circumstances have pivoted for the better. I’m optimistic. I know what the Texas Department of Public Safety surge operations look like. I’ve seen it down the border. They’re going to catch stuff.

I guarantee you they’re going to catch a lot of stuff. And the things that they don’t catch, they’re going to flee, leave the area and go underground for as long. And that’s all good. Yeah. Any sort of crime suppression is a good approach to take. You mentioned in the walk up to the show, you and I were chatting. You’ve got an article that’s just come out. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about it? That’s right.

So the Daily Mail just published my dispatch from the village of Fronton down on the south south tip of Texas, where the Texas Department of Public Safety mounted a pretty unusual operation which was to seize control by force. Of arms of 170 Acre Island that had fallen under the complete control of two cartels on the other side who have been just preying on the Texas side. Farmers, ranchers, cops, I mean, anybody who would come anywhere near there or get in the way of their operations.

And they’ve been doing a lot of drug trafficking through there into the interior of the country. It’s kind of a free for all. They had immunity on this island. Fronton island is the name of it because up until very recently, neither the Mexicans nor the Americans really knew who the island belonged to. And you can’t go onto an island and do law enforcement stuff without the other guy’s permission and vice versa.

They both just have stayed away from it rather than risk some diplomatic row. And so the cartels have just been in there. But Texas decided that there was so much trouble lately with this island that they surveyed it, did all the land surveys, and it came out that the entire island was entirely north of the international boundary. So they went in on Monday morning, I went in with them full force.

Texas Rangers, even some us. Soldiers that I’m not allowed to talk about went in there. I think you just did. I’m not going to give you any detail. Those guys are not in the story. But what’s interesting about this is most of the Texas operations down on the border deal with kind of a soft kind of target area, which know, the immigrants that are coming across, they’re just trying to block the immigrants.

But this is something entirely different because the entire other Mexican side is pure cartel land, and it’s on a bluffs on a rise with sniper nest all along the thing and even the names of the cartels spray painted on the front of these buildings. And they are not afraid to shoot at cops. They wounded a Texas Department of Public Safety officer. That’s outrageous. Just a couple of years ago, they have machine gunned border patrol boats.

They’re killing and pillaging all through that area. And now the Department of Public Safety, Texas is going to be like in a forward operating base, I guess for lack of a better word, and fingers crossed for guys. That sounds like a fascinating story. And you say it’s in daily mail. It’s in the Daily Mail today with video. Lots and lots of pictures. Lots of video of the invasion.

I mean, it literally was an island invasion. We took it by force. Well, I guarantee you we will link and post that with this podcast so folks that are listening to us or watching us can click on that and check out the story. I’m sure it is fascinating. That sounds like quite an operation. An amphibious assault onto an American island and retaking it from cartel. That is wild stuff.

We haven’t done that yet. That’s a new one. Yeah, that is wild. Tod, talk to us about your book, Overrun. Where can people find it? Sure. Overrun how Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in US. History. That book is in bookstores anywhere. Books are sold, amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever. And the book is really the only one out there that documents in a real painstaking, reporter based way how we got into this situation with this border crisis.

It’s about this particular border crisis, the first two years of it. And obviously I had to stop. And I was very clear in the book that, hey, we’re not even through this thing yet. But if we’re ever going to get through it, we have to understand how we got into it. If we’re ever going to get out of it, we have to figure out what was the pathway into it.

And this book is really kind of a complete reference guide for what happened, what we did, how we got into this. That’s great. I commend the book to you, Tod. Where can folks follow your work? You got social media handles or website or where can they find out more about what you’re doing? Right? I mean, you can follow my Ex account, Benzmantodd. I’m on Todd Benzman at getter.

I mean, just look me up there. And truth social. I’ve got an account on Truth Social. I post on all of those. And the best place to keep track of my work, because I publish widely, even though I work for the center for Immigration Studies, is eventually I put all of it on my personal website. Todbenzman. com. Tod Benzman, senior National Security Fellow for the center for Immigration Studies.

We really appreciate you joining us and kind of bringing us up to speed on the mega ultra border crisis and how bad it’s getting. Come up with something. Thank you again, Tod. Really appreciate you joining us. Thank you. I’m Chris Farrell on watch. .