President Joe Biden’s mixed messaging on immigration is partially to blame for the violence and bloodshed between migrants and Mexican law enforcement near the U.S. southern border, according to a national security fellow.
Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program that he personally witnessed a violent clash between a caravan of migrants traveling north through Mexico toward the U.S. border, and law enforcement trying to hold them back.
He said that Mexican authorities typically stretch a cord across a road when caravans are coming, and they meet them wearing riot gear and helmets.
“The migrants will put their toughest, youngest gangsters up front, with rocks, bottles, sticks with nails in them, and everything else, and they will charge at the soldiers,” said Bensman, author of “America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.”
“There will be full-out clashes in the street. And a lot of times it works; they bust through and then all the women and children and everybody else just pours through and they’re in, they get through.”
Bensman said that there was a “surprise attack” in the clash he witnessed.
“Mexicans were hiding in the bushes and all along the road, and then on the signal, they all just pounced behind them and in front of them. They [law enforcement] beat them silly. I mean, there’s no other way to say it,” he recalled.
“There was a lot of blood, and they brought in buses and, with billy clubs, beat them all onto the buses, and turned those buses around and shipped them back to Tapachula detention center.
“That’s the cycle down there.
“The bloodshed spilled in those clashes really is because of the Biden administration.”
Biden, who campaigned in part on rescinding his predecessor’s immigration orders, not only halted construction of the wall at the border but ended the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which had forced many asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their claims were heard. The administration restarted the MPP program in El Paso, Texas, in early December 2021, in response to a court order.
The Biden administration also curtailed the use of pandemic powers to allow all illegal immigrant children who arrive without a responsible adult to stay in the United States.
Those changes triggered the largest wave of illegal immigration the United States has ever seen, according to some experts. Under Biden, the United States has already set records for the most illegal immigrant apprehensions in a fiscal year and a calendar year.
Border apprehensions surged in 2021 to almost 1.9 million—up from 479,000 in 2020.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
By Isabel van Brugen and Joshua Philipp
