By Todd Bensman as originally published April 14, 2021 by the Center for Immigration Studies

As a mass-migration wave overwhelms the southern border, the Department of Justice and Department of the Treasury have brought hammers down on a Pakistan-based human smuggling organization that continues to illegally ferry foreign nationals “who pose a threat to national security” through the Americas to the U.S. southern border.

CIA, DIA, FBI, satellites, military play major parts in U.S.-based globe-spanning network

By Todd Bensman as originally published April 5, 2021 by SpyTalk.com

In 2017, an informant for the Texas Department of Public Safety inside Mexico reported that three suspected Pakistani al-Qaeda operatives were about to cross the border. The alarming report landed on my desk because I worked for DPS’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division, where I managed an analytical team that worked terrorism such threat matters alongside federal agencies inside the Austin-based Texas Fusion Center.

Within a few days, U.S. Border Patrol agents picked up three Pakistanis near Laredo and reported it to my team. Per usual with reports of a…

Charters and Greyhound are delivering them where they want to go

By Todd Bensman as published March 31, 2021 by the Center for Immigration Studies

DEL RIO, Texas — On a recent evening with the night ahead looking long, an idling charter bus parked on a lot prepared to disperse a new kind of import throughout the American landscape.

The bus and a small van nearby were packed with 60 or so mostly Haitian families fresh out of the Rio Grande from their illegal crossings.

After testing negative for Covid and other processing, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had given them legal documents and released them to a local nongovernmental…

DHS acknowledges that suspected Islamic terrorists are crossing the southern border

By Todd Bensman as published March 19, 2021 by the Center for Immigration Studies

“We are able to identify and apprehend them and ensure that they do not remain in the United States.”

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week asserted that suspected Islamic terrorists can and have crossed the porous southern border for years, a claim that major media organizations and lawmakers widely pilloried as a fear-mongering falsehood when President Donald Trump and his administration made the same claim in 2019.

Mayorkas’ comments that migrant suspects on U.S. terrorism watch lists cross the border came amid…

By Todd Bensman as originally published March 16, 2021 by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

More than six weeks have elapsed since a major American journalism scandal broke with the federal arrest of U.S. newspaper editorialist and frequent cable news commentator Kaveh Afrasiabi, who long sold himself as a neutral expert on Iran.

The initial Department of Justice media release alleged that, during all the 13 years Afrasiabi wrote op-eds for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Washington Times, and esteemed academic journals, the Islamic Republic of Iran was richly paying and directing him to propagandize for the regime…

Watching dangerous illegal immigrants walk around free of deportation fear ‘really sucks’

As originally published March 9, 2021 by the Center for Immigration Studies

Learning how immigration policy orders streaming out of the new management in Washington actually play out on the front lines is a tough proposition these days. Few in the field are exactly eager to talk about their jobs when they perceive that high-up bosses hate them. That is most especially true of those who work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ICE ERO) division, the Democratic Party’s favorite whipping boy.

One of President Biden’s first moves in office was to “pause” almost all ERO…

By Todd Bensman as originally published March 10 by Homeland Security Today

Late last month on Integration Bridge, which spans a Peru-Brazil river border crossing, a U.S.-bound migrant caravan of perhaps 400 repeatedly clashed with militarized border police determined to enforce a coronavirus closure.

By Todd Bensman as originally published March 9, 2021 by The National Pulse

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