When I checked into my hotel in the border Mexican town of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico this week, I was surprised to learn that a lot of my guests had driven greater than 7,000 miles from their homes in the Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan.
This isn’t your father’s illegal immigration.
After Joe Biden’s inauguration, people smugglers and their clients around the world responded to what they called “la Invitación” of the recent president to cross the US border illegally.
Over the past two years or more, the Biden-Harris administration has released greater than 2 million illegal immigrants to the United States, and one other 1.5 million “fugitives” haven’t been internally deported, prompting increasingly more people to try their luck.
All this happened while something referred to as “Title 42” still existed. Title 42 Public Health Orders were issued during COVID and allowed Border Patrol agents to expel border jumpers without questioning.
It was the only Trump-era border measure that the current administration has kept, even though it is used on a smaller proportion of migrants.
But Title 42 ends this week and I desired to see what was occurring for myself, so I drove to the southernmost point of the Texas-Mexico border.
![CIS analyst Todd Bensman lives on the border in Matamoros, Mexico, in a huge migrant camp.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/razor-wire-2.jpg?w=1024)
I expected a whole lot of waiting.
Venezuelans particularly flocked to the Matamoros bus station, and plenty of Venezuelans from the huge migrant camp on the Mexican side told me they desired to see what happens after Title 42 ends. back to Caracas, where most of them had not been for years as they’d arrange recent homes in other parts of South America.
They and others said that at the first sign that border-crossers are still being released into the US under the recent rules, they intend to move across the river.
It turned out, nevertheless, that a lot of them didn’t wait and saw – they’re already pouring across the border. They cross at a rate of 10,000 a day along the entire border – and only those that surrender.
![CIS analyst Todd Bensman lives on the border in Matamoros, Mexico, in a huge migrant camp.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/razor-wire-1.jpg?w=1024)
As context, the head of Obama’s DHS once said that as much as 1,000 border arrests a day overloaded the system.
At the Matamoros migrant camp, a short lived home for some 10,000 would-be migrants, not only young men but in addition families with children and even infants were observed crossing the river into Texas all day and all night.
While the Biden administration doesn’t want state governments to interfere with its illegal immigrant importation system, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has sent state police and the National Guard to attempt to block some passages.
My video of state troopers manning a ridge atop a riverbank in Brownsville, stopping illegal immigrants from getting in, went viral. Briefly order, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called a press conference to denounce the unrepentant Texans. He said he couldn’t discuss the “legality or otherwise” of Texas doing what his department refused to do, but he clearly didn’t prefer it.
When I was on the Mexican side and watched a whole bunch of migrants crossing the Rio Grande, I noticed a wierd pattern.
![Border crossings in Mexico.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/razor-wire-10.jpg?w=1024)
A gaggle of about 100 or 150 would rise up as if on cue, followed by a pause, followed by the next group.
So I asked the Mexican immigration officials on site what was occurring they usually told me something shocking.
They said their superiors were negotiating with U.S. officials when to permit illegal immigrants to cross the river.
Biden’s DHS desired to be certain they finished “processing” the batch of migrants before the next batch arrives to make the whole process look less messy and newsworthy.
To perform this, they worked with Mexican officials via encrypted social media chat when to let the next group pass.
This goes beyond simply allowing illegal immigration – it’s facilitating it.
Todd Bensman is the writer of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Best Border Crisis in US History.