Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the mainstream media’s refusal to acknowledge how the Biden administration’s compliance in scuttling Haiti’s elections back in 2021 contributes to the chaos currently unfolding in the Caribbean country stems from the fact that the backstory is a “terrible” look for President Joe Biden.
In 2021, thousands of Haitians were deported back to Haiti from a Del Rio, Texas migrant camp allegedly in exchange for the country’s elections to be postponed at the request of unelected leader Ariel Henry, who has served as the acting Haiti Prime Minister and the acting president of Haiti since July 2021 after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Bensman said the deal between the Biden State Department and Henry was the “stake driven through Haiti’s heart” which “killed it.”
“That was the final stake. It’s not like Haiti wasn’t already pretty wounded, but it didn’t take a whole lot to kill it dead, the Haitian state. And that was it,” Bensman said on Wednesday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Bensman has written about the 2021 deal between the State Department and Henry in his book Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, which was published over a year ago.
Bensman said it was important for the “full story” of how Haiti descended into chaos to be resurfaced now since the situation in the Caribbean country has escalated to a state of emergency.
“I just write the piece to fill in the full story of what actually happened since there’s so many media and pundits and people talking about Haiti right now. It’s in the news, but never once is it addressed anywhere that the Biden administration did this and why they did it, and I thought it was important to have the story run again.”
“This is not the first time. It’s been in my book, Overrun, for a year now and I have written about this back then before the collapse of the Haitian state,” Bensman added.
Bensman said the mainstream media will not cover the 2021 deal due to it making President Biden look “terrible” and showing how “two-faced” his administration is in regards to its calls for elections to be held now in the troubled country.
“You don’t hear a whole lot about it. There’s you, and there are a few other media outlets that have picked this up – it’s on Twitter and whatnot – but I don’t think you’ll ever see this in the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or CNN, NBC, any of the networks. I think they’re in the bag, they’re in the can for Joe Biden and this makes Joe Biden look absolutely terrible. But I think they should talk about it if they want to properly educate the American people about why Haiti is in this situation and also to show how two-faced it is that the administration is now calling for elections for Haiti,” Bensman said.
“Whatever they do, if there’s a military intervention, it’s all supposed to be in the service of these elections that they already killed once. So any sort of cost that are borne by the American taxpayer or troops, military expenditures, and whatever else is because of those decisions that were made about Del Rio, Texas and that migrant camp down there,” he added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
