Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the U.S. is on track to encounter more than 600,000 illegal aliens that have traveled through the Darién Gap, which is the only land path connecting Central America and South America, to get to the U.S.-Mexico border this year.
The Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama consists of more than 60 miles of dense rainforest, steep mountains, and vast swamps. Illegal immigrants from South America and other parts of the world use the land path as a passageway to get to North America.
Bensman said the “normal” number of illegal immigrants that cross the Darién Gap to get to the U.S.-Mexico border per year is less than 10,000, however, explained how that number has risen exponentially under the Biden administration.
“In a normal year…they’ll get maybe 7,000 or 8,000 a year,” Bensman explained on Thursday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy. “Mostly young, strong Olympiad males coming through because…it’s physically demanding. In the first year of the Biden administration, we saw 250,000 come through there. Last year, we had 450,000 come through. This year, it’s projected to push 600,000 – now that’s compared to a normal, less than 10,000 a year – because the entire world has heard the clarion call of catch and release at the border. Everybody gets in. About 85 percent of everybody who reaches that border, according to Mayorkas, he said above 85 percent like a couple of weeks ago, is allowed in the country. I think it’s really closer to 100 percent. I don’t see anybody getting pushed back really and so the whole world understands.”
Bensman also addressed the troubling rise of illegal immigrants on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist being encountered at the border under the Biden administration, saying, “We are seeing the highest number ever.”
“We are seeing the highest number ever of people who are crossing the border and are apprehended who are on the FBI’s terror watch list before they ever even got to the border,” Bensman said. “That’s about 340 now, I think last count in a 36 month span. In a normal year, we might get you know, 5, 10 on both sides of the border, we caught some in Mexico. That, to me, is like taking a test tube sample for the lab of the pool and finding it pretty dirty. Two million immigrants have gotten through undetected into the interior so if you caught 350, that’s not a good news story. It’s against the backdrop of 2 million know gotaways.”
“We have immigrants coming from countries of national security interest, every nation of the Middle East, all of the -stan countries, Muslim majority countries where terrorist organizations operate and we’re catching terrorists from those countries, terrorist suspects from those countries. We think that there’s been some pretty good reporting that about 80,000 what they call ‘special interest aliens’ have crossed in just the last year. In a normal year, we might get 3,000 or 4,000,” Bensman added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
