Expert: The Border Crisis Is Over

This article was written by Kim Wexler and is a transcript of statements made by Center for Immigration Studies senior fellow Todd Bensman during an interview on Newsmax.

I’ve often said — you can end this border crisis in about one hour. You don’t need a bipartisan bill, or any of that stuff. And that’s what happened. Trump just changed the policies, and the border crisis is, for all intents and purposes, over now.

Because the numbers are down below 500 a day, which we have not seen in many years.

Among all of the different executive orders he’s put in, and policies that he’s changed, one that has kind of escaped everybody’s notice is his use of the INA Section 212(f).

It allows the president to seal the border and expel one hundred percent of everybody who crosses, without granting them the ability to claim asylum.

That’s been in there all along.

All through the campaign, when Harris and all the Democrats were saying we need this complex bill from the Senate — no we didn’t! They just needed 212(f).

Trump is using it now, expelling everybody that they catch, across to the other side.

[Declaring drug cartels as foreign terrorist groups] is a little bit more complicated.

He can’t just, with an executive order, declare them foreign terrorist organizations, but he’s basically telling the State Department to do it within the next two weeks, so we’ll keep an eye on that.

The big question about that is: what is the personnel infrastructure in place to be able to enforce on the new authorities for Mexican cartels that are used currently for ISIS, and Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and Islamic terrorist organizations.

Normally that all falls within the bailiwick of the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and there are 67 of those kind of organizations.

Just the Sinaloa cartel itself has 60,000 employees. So it will be interesting to see how they staff and resource any kind of new FTO that comes out about the Mexican cartels.