When I checked into my hotel this week in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico, I was surprised to learn that many of my fellow guests had traveled more than 7,000 miles from their homes in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan.
This is not your father’s illegal immigration.
Upon Joe Biden’s inauguration, people smugglers and their customers worldwide responded to what they called the new president’s “la Invitación” to cross the US border illegally.
Over the past two-plus years, the Biden-Harris administration has released more than 2 million illegal immigrants into the United States, with another 1.5 million “got-aways” facing no interior deportation, prompting ever more to come and try their luck.
All that happened while something known by the nickname “Title 42” was still in place. Title 42 public health orders were issued during COVID and allowed Border Patrol agents to expel border jumpers without hearings.
It was the only Trump-era border measure the current administration kept in place, though it’s been using it for an ever-smaller share of migrants.
But Title 42 ends this week, and I wanted to see for myself what was happening, so I drove down to the southernmost point of the Texas/Mexico border.
I expected a lot of wait-and-see.
Venezuelans especially were pouring into the Matamoros bus station, and many Venezuelans at a huge migrant camp on the Mexican side told me they wanted to see what would happen with the end of Title 42. They’d heard a lot of tough rhetoric from the Department of Homeland Security and certainly didn’t want to be sent back to Caracas, where most of them had not been for years, having established new homes elsewhere in South America.
They and others said that at the first sign that under the new rules border-crossers were still being released into the US, they were going to head across the river.
But it turned out that many of them didn’t wait and see — they’re pouring across the border already. They’ve been crossing at a rate of 10,000 a day along the whole border — and that’s just the ones who turn themselves in.
As context, Obama’s DHS chief once said that even 1,000 border arrests a day overwhelmed the system.
The migrant camp in Matamoros, temporary home to maybe 10,000 wannabe immigrants, saw river crossings into Texas all day and all night, not just young men but also families with children and even babies.
While the Biden administration doesn’t want state governments interfering in its illegal-immigrant-importation system, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has sent state police and National Guard to try to block some of the crossings.
My footage of state troopers manning the ridge at the top of the riverbank in Brownsville preventing illegal immigrants from getting in went viral. In short order, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called a press conference to condemn the Texans, who remained unrepentant. He said he couldn’t speak to the “lawfulness, or lack thereof” of Texas doing what his department refuses to do, but he clearly didn’t like it.
While I was on the Mexican side watching hundreds upon hundreds of migrants crossing the Rio Grande, I noticed an odd pattern.
A group of maybe 100 or 150 people would get up as though in response to a signal, and then there was a pause, followed in a little while by another group.
So I asked the Mexican immigration officials on site what was going on, and they told me something shocking.
They said their superiors were coordinating with US officials on when to let illegal immigrants cross the river.
Biden’s DHS wanted to make sure they were finished “processing” a batch of migrants before the next batch came across, to make the whole process look less chaotic and newsworthy.
To achieve that, they were collaborating with Mexican officials through an encrypted social media chatroom on when to allow the next group to cross.
This goes beyond just acquiescing to illegal immigration — it’s facilitating it.
Todd Bensman is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
