As published September 2, 2026 in The Daily Signal

As America prepares to memorialize the 25^th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, expect a bright, glaring omission in the upcoming speeches, editorials, and televised survivor retrospectives about this history, important to tell for its warning that national vigilance remains necessary even now.

Left on the cutting room floors will be the all-important, basic “why”, exactly, al-Qaeda hijackers carried out these attacks. The too-offensive-for-public-discourse “why” part of 9/11 can be readily found in, for instance, the recovered United Airlines Flight 93 cockpit recordings, which reveal one hijacker’s motivation at an authentic moment of truth. Nine times over that nosediving flight’s final six seconds before it disintegrated with all 40 victims into a Shanksville, Pa. field, the hijacker repeatedly chanted: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar…!” Allah is great.

Expect schoolteachers, media pundits, and elected leaders speechifying at the New York memorial (think New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani), to pretzel-twist themselves around ever saying aloud that a religious motive rooted in Islamist ideology drove the 9/11 hijackers to that mass murder—and still does. Removing even passing references to Islamism as 9/11’s guiding motivation from the coming national discourse short-circuits civic duty to remind Americans that this problem lives on 25 years later as a national security threat.

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The nation saw it in the 2026 vehicle-ramming and shooting at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, 2025’s truck-ramming attack in New Orleans, the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington D.C., and the 2024 firearms attack on Chicago’s Jewish community, to name just a fractional few in recent times.

We can predict purposeful omission because we saw it five years ago on the 20^th anniversary. USA Today, for instance, posted a story with the subhead “Eight influential Muslim Americans discuss how 9/11 and Islamophobia affected life in the U.S. over two decades.” CBS News reported a story it titled “Muslim Americans still face hostility 20 years after 9/11.” A CNN story led with the headline: “Too many US Muslim children dread 9/11 every year.”

Fortunately, America still has the 567-page bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report, the U.S. government account of how the attacks succeeded, and still unflinchingly tells us why the perpetrators carried them out. To be sure, the 9/11 Commission report has its detractors who have quibbled with its talk about Islam. But the document stands factually unscathed, its gravitas intact.

If there was ever a time to let the 2004 government tome do its job, it is now, when gatekeepers regard essential truths as politically unsuitable for American minds. Here are some of the 9/11 Commission’s most pertinent excerpts for teachers, speakers, and writers who will dare to invoke them in the coming weeks:

• “…Usama Bin Ladin and other Islamist terrorist leaders draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within one stream of Islam (a minority tradition), from at least Ibn Taimiyyah, through the founders of Wahhabism, through the Muslim Brotherhood, to Sayyid Qutb. That stream is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, thus distorting both. It is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it there is no common ground—not even respect for life—on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated.” —What to Do? A Global Strategy, Reflecting on a Generational Challenge, Defining the Threat, page 362.

• “Bin Ladin also relies heavily on the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood executed in 1966 on charges of attempting to overthrow the government, Qutb mixed Islamic scholarship with a very superficial acquaintance with Western history and thought… He claimed that the world was beset with barbarism, licentiousness, and unbelief (a condition he called Jahiliyya, the religious term for the period of ignorance prior to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed). Qutb argued that humans can choose only between Islam and Jahiliyya… All Muslims–as he defined them–therefore must take up arms in this fight. Any Muslim who rejects his ideas is just one more nonbeliever worthy of destruction. Bin Ladin shares Qutb’s stark view, permitting him and his followers to rationalize even unprovoked mass murder as righteous defense of an embattled faith.” —The Foundation of the New Terrorism, Bin Ladin’s World View, page 51.

• “Many Americans have wondered, “Why do ‘they’ hate us?’ Bin Ladin’s grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became far deeper. Al-Qaeda’s answer was that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of its society and culture.” —Page 51.

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• “The history, culture, and body of beliefs from which Bin Ladin has shaped and spread his message are largely unknown to many Americans. Seizing on symbols of Islam’s past greatness, he promises to restore pride to people who consider themselves the victims of successive foreign masters. He uses cultural and religious allusions to the holy Qur’an and some of its interpreters. His rhetoric selectively draws from multiple sources—Islam, history, and the region’s political and economic malaise.” —Bin Ladin’s Appeal in the Islamic World, page 48.

• “In February 1998 … Bin Ladin and a fugitive Egyptian physician, Ayman al Zawahiri,… called for the murder of any American, anywhere on Earth, as the ‘individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.’”—The Foundation of the New Terrorism, A Declaration of War, page 47.

• “Our enemy is twofold: al-Qaeda, a stateless network of terrorists that struck us on 9/11; and a radical ideological movement in the Islamic world…which has spawned terrorist groups and violence across the globe. The first enemy is weakened…The second enemy is gathering and will menace Americans and American interests long after Usama Bin Ladin and his cohorts are killed or captured. Thus our strategy must match our means to two ends: dismantling the al-Qaeda network and prevailing in the longer term over the ideology that gives rise to Islamist terrorism”—The present danger is Islamist terrorism – What to Do? A Global Strategy, page 363.

• “The small percentage of Muslims who are fully committed to Bin Ladin’s version of Islam are impervious to persuasion. Muslims themselves will have to reflect upon such basic issues as the concept of jihad, the position of women, and the place of non-Muslim minorities. The United States can promote moderation but cannot ensure its ascendancy. Only Muslims can do this.”—Engage the Struggle of Ideas, page 375.

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  On Chris Cuomo Show: Argument for Deporting Unprosecuted Illegal Aliens

As published August 28, 2026 in The American Mind

Last summer, European news outlets reported that drug cartel “volunteers” from Mexico and Colombia had infiltrated Ukraine’s military – considered the world’s “drone superpower” – to learn cutting-edge drone warfare so they can use the knowledge to kill their enemies back home.

The need to terminate this knowledge transfer, if it’s not too late, matters because U.S. military, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel are deployed for clandestine work inside and all around those countries trying to eradicate these same criminal organizations. In the hands of vengeful cartel murderers, the world’s latest and greatest battlefield-proven drone tech and tactics threaten to do to U.S. ground personnel what the Ukrainian army claims it did to 30,000 Russian soldiers in July alone.

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But if anyone thought Ukraine had quickly cleared out all the cartel infiltrators since those 2025 news reports, they’re sadly mistaken. The Financial Times just reported that Ukraine has discovered yet more Colombians with organized crime connections in-country with “unusual obsessions” about battlefield drone fighting. The exfiltration problem lives on.

“Former paramilitaries, former guerillas and former soldiers are fighting and learning together here how to operate drones,” a Colombian aid worker in Ukraine told the Financial Times for the August 6 story.

The U.S. media has largely sat this story out. Even if not yet publicly verified by the U.S. Intelligence Community or media, the as-yet to be disputed allegations now demand scrutiny and broader attention in the United States to prompt appropriate action.

U.S. lawmakers should note the bitter irony of America’s cartel enemies stealing drone-warfare excellence funded by some of the $70 billion in U.S. taxpayer money they appropriated to Ukraine, and condition change on the tens of billions more in the pipeline.

What we think we know

On July 30, 2025 the French website Intelligence Online first reported that Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) launched an investigation after Mexico’s National Intelligence Center warned that Mexican cartel fighters had infiltrated Spanish-speaking units of the International Legion.

Their alleged intention was to learn how to fly “first-person view (FPV)” drones, drone-attack tech ideas, and battlefield tactics that Ukraine’s armed forces have famously used to stall Russia’s invasion.

Foreign outlets keep turning up new information, such as Poland and Bulgaria have begun their own investigations into smuggling pipelines through their territories.

Granular details seem to bolster the reports. For instance, some volunteers already accomplished in drone fighting have joined the legion’s specialized tactical intelligence combat unit known as “Ethos” in the combat-heavy Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, according to the reports.

Polish officials reportedly revealed that private Mexican and Colombian security companies with alleged ties to drug trafficking networks financed and smuggled the volunteers into Ukraine through neighboring countries on false documents. One Colombian security firm based in Cali and Medellin reportedly recruited former Colombian Army rangers.

One smuggled Mexican legion volunteer operating under the alias “Aguila-7” registered in March 2024 using fraudulent Salvadoran documentation. He proved so technically proficient during drone training in Lviv that instructors called for an investigation, which later found probable connections to Mexico’s elite GAFE air-mobile special forces (Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales), whose former personnel have joined cartels, the reports said.

Why it matters

The infiltrations coincide with President Trump’s day-one declaration of a U.S. war to eradicate the cartels, designating many as foreign terrorist organizations. If cartel leaders are out to avenge what they have suffered, their drones can find many more targetable American personnel.

No one should have been surprised, for instance, when two CIA officers died this past April in a Chihuahua State car accident while traveling with Mexican forces after a drug lab raid. They were present because Trump has surged military and CIA personnel into Mexico and Latin America, as well as naval and aircraft assets for lethal boat bombing operations that have killed hundreds of drug smugglers. The operations have included supposed CIA-facilitated assassinations in Mexico.

An “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition” of 19 Latin American countries is heavily reliant on local national security forces within which U.S. intelligence community operatives are embedded. Additionally, some 9,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed along 845 miles of the U.S. southern border in expanding “National Defense Areas” intended to deny cartel drug-load entries along with illegal immigration. By many accounts, gangs in Colombia and Mexico are angry about the resulting killings, drug lab raids, boat bombings, profit disruptions, and imprisonments on U.S. terrorism charges.

READ THE REST HERE

As published August 26, 2026 in The Federalist

For more than three decades, the mystery of who blew Alas Chiricanas Flight 901 out of the Panama sky, killing all 21 aboard, including 12 top Jewish businessmen and three U.S. citizens, remained unsolved and mostly forgotten by the outside world. The small commuter plane to Panama City exploded July 19, 1994, shortly after takeoff from Colon, leaving only one body in the wreckage, not positively identified for years: a Middle Eastern male thought to have carried the bomb aboard.

But now Panamanian authorities have the bombing’s suspected Iranian-backed Hezbollah mastermind in custody: Ali Zaki Hage Jalil, a 57-year-old Colombian-Venezuelan of Lebanese descent. A revelatory terrorism trial of the century is on the immediate horizon.

Judicial proceedings in Panama City promise to spotlight for Americans how Iran still fields clandestine networks in America’s backyard. These can target the large U.S. citizen expatriate population living in Central America and Mexico as well as thousands of regional American businesses.

After U.S.-Israel airstrikes killed his father, Iran’s new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei wrote that his top strategic priority was to exact a blood “vengeance” on the United States and its leaders and that “freedom-seekers across the world [author’s emphasis] will each carry out part of this divine mission.”

Under pressure from a U.S. naval flotilla in November of last year, the FBI and Panama persuaded Maduro’s government to arrest Hage Jalil in the known Hezbollah enclave of Marguerita Island. In April, after Maduro was deposed, Venezuela extradited him to stand trial in Panama. Undoubtedly, Hage Jalil has remained plugged into the Iranian network on Marguerita Island and, with a successful trial, could fill actionable intelligence gaps about what Iran might be planning and how it operates.

More Recent Iranian Disruption

The Iranians and their proxies have been disruptive throughout Latin America.

While 30 years have passed since the Flight 901 bombing, as recently as November 2025, the U.S. and Israel publicly thanked Mexico for foiling an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) plot to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Mexico, Einat Kranz Neiger. Tehran and Mexico City later denied knowledge of such a plot.

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Bensman’s past Flight 901 reporting from Panama:

Did Panama Ever Reopen Its Investigation Into The Flight 901 Bombing?

FBI “Actively Pursues” a Possible Hezbollah ’94 Plane Bombing

Where Is the Promised Investigation of Iran’s Deadly Panama Bombing?

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Whatever may have happened last year in Mexico, no serious Latin American geopolitical scholar disagrees that Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah and the IRGC’s Quds Force, established clandestine operating bases in embassies throughout Latin America decades ago, in part, to counter Israeli and U.S. Iran policies in the Middle East.

The Atlantic Council, RAND and other policy institutes estimate that Hezbollah and the IRGC have enjoyed overt and clandestine access to 11 embassies and 36 Iran-linked Shiite “cultural centers” in tolerant or outright friendly Spanish-speaking nations governed by leftist leaders openly antithetical to the United States. These host nations included Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina.

Neither Panama nor Mexico usually makes that list of known hosts. But U.S. intelligence services may not know what they don’t know, which makes a Panama trial all the more important.

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Iran’s Malign History in Latin America

Iran’s malign history in Latin America shows it has mainly targeted Jews and Israeli interests, as the Flight 901 bombing shows.

In 2024, Peruvian police arrested an Iranian citizen and member of the Quds Force on charges of planning to murder an Israeli. In 2023, Brazilian authorities arrested three suspected Hezbollah agents for plotting terror attacks against Jewish targets. In 2016, according to RAND, Bolivian police allegedly disrupted a Hezbollah bomb plot by seizing 2.5 tons of explosives from a La Paz warehouse.

Indeed, the Flight 901 bombing probably drew little attention back in 1994 because, only one day earlier, Hezbollah suicide bombers operating from the cover of Iran’s embassies truck-bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85 and wounding 300, a lengthy 2006 Argentinian indictment alleges. That attack came two years after Hezbollah and IRGC operatives truck-bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring 242.

U.S. Soft Targets Next?

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James Talarico, the left-wing Democrat ahead in some polls in the Texas U.S. Senate race against Republican Ken Paxton, has staked out a guiding border security policy idea that has puzzled many voters: “Our border should be like a front porch — it should have a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door,” he has said on the campaign trail and in his online border policy page.

Whatever Talarico is signaling might matter if he becomes the first Democrat senator from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. That’s because he proclaims on his campaign page that “Texans should be the ones to lead our country in finally pursuing comprehensive immigration reforms …” and asks voters to “imagine having a U.S. Senator from Texas who will take the charge to get that done.”

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So, does Talarico’s metaphor about locking the door of Texas — owner of the longest international border of any of the contiguous states — mean he’s a hardline restrictionist who would channel Trump’s policies, which ended the worst mass migration border crisis in American history? Or does his “welcome mat” metaphor mean Talarico would start another mass migration crisis at the southern border?

The smart money is on the latter option. A careful examination of Talarico’s elaborating public statements, social media, and “commonsense border security” campaign materials demonstrates that his locked-door-welcome-mat ideas, if ever implemented, would closely replicate the Biden administration’s wide-open border and likewise induce another swamping tidal wave of humanity to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

There’s a universal principle that always determines the start or end of mass migration events. It boils down to whether American political leaders and courts allow enough illegal border jumpers to successfully enter and stay to earn enough money to at least repay their smuggling investment. If they are let in to stay, they’ll come in force because the effort is worth the smuggling money. If they’re expelled and blocked, they won’t risk the money.

A pure “welcome mat” policy, therefore, lets illegal immigrants in to earn money long-term without fear of deportation (usually while pursuing meritless political asylum or humanitarian protection claims). If they calculate for that outcome, aspiring illegal immigrants will pay regardless of whether they must beg, borrow, or steal the smuggling money. A profound real-world example happened in 2021, when the Biden administration began admitting most arriving inadmissible aliens into the country to eventually start their meritless asylum claims.

Millions from all over the world paid the smuggling fees and bum-rushed the border for the next four years, the worst mass migration crisis in American history.

Conversely, if an allegedly “locked door” policy stops, blocks, and actively deports, would-be illegal immigrants will just stay home and save their smuggling money for when the welcome mat is laid out again.

A profound real-world example of how the “locked door” works happened when Trump’s proclamation “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion” suspended the right of illegal crossers to apply for asylum. The asylum ban, plus orders for Border Patrol and U.S. military personnel to catch everyone they could and expel them, along with at least the promise of mass interior deportations, abruptly ended the 2021-2024 crisis. Aspiring illegal aliens are still staying home rather than gambling their money against high-probability border or interior expulsion.

Masking a Biden Border Restoration

But what Talarico means when he says “locking the door” is the opposite of what Trump meant and what most Americans might think it means.

Talarico’s plan calls for restarting asylum claims at the border and fast-tracking determinations by hiring more immigration judges “so that only legitimate claims are approved, and ensure legitimate asylees receive protection quickly,” he promised at a July campaign rally.

Few seem to realize that Talarico’s entire scheme comes straight from the Biden border playbook, right down to its infamous terminology. While Talarico publicly condemns Biden’s border policies as terrible, he adopts the Biden-era “safe, orderly process at our southern border” description to describe his plan, which is almost identical to the “safe, orderly, and humane” asylum processing that Biden’s U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas once deployed. Mayorkas never tired of using the “safe-orderly” euphemism to also describe supposedly fast-tracked asylum decisions.

Sweetening the Old Biden Pie: No Expulsion or Deportation

But here’s the real rub about Talarico’s Orwellian use of “locking the door” campaign imagery. All of his plans exempt the majority of illegal aliens from deportation, presumably to include those DENIED asylum. Deportation is only applied in the unlikely event that some fresh border arrivals who have never been inside the country are somehow discovered to be U.S.-convicted criminals, confirmed gang members, or human traffickers. But the bright, glaring omission in Talarico’s plans and statements is a single provision for deporting everyone who was declined in his fast-tracked asylum process.

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The great Ceuta mass migration crisis—during which a human tsunami of 72,000 North Africans swamped the Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast on July 30 and 31—could easily have lasted for months. However, it is all over but for some mopping up.

Few, if any more, are coming or adding to the death toll of 75. Most of those who crashed the European Union’s gates at Spain’s Ceuta are back in Morocco. A few thousand migrants remain who are generally harder to return under Spanish/European Union rules—such as sub-Saharan Africans and unaccompanied minors.

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But it is no coincidence that the Spanish-Moroccan border is as quiet as President Donald Trump made the U.S.-Mexico border on about his first day in office.

Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez remains unapologetically supportive of illegal immigration and an open-borders advocate. But for one moment, when he was caught in the clinch of a humanitarian and political emergency in front of television cameras, Sanchez appears to have torn a page from the Trump border playbook.

By independent media accounts, Sanchez quickly militarized the Ceuta marine border, provided little, if any, food or shelter, and oversaw the expeditious expulsion of most of the 72,000 who flooded the Spanish territory.

Sanchez will no doubt return to his true open borders colors soon. But the Trump method that ended the Ceuta crisis offers lessons that are crucial to understand—as is how Sanchez and his United States Socialist brethren always start such crises.

The principle at play when mass migrations start and end is surprisingly self-evident,,, yet somehow still escapes acknowledgement in leftist American policymaking.

When a government admits illegal aliens into its rich country, unlimited millions will surge toward the breach, willing to invest time and money for the effort. Conversely, when a government quickly expels and denies entry, aspiring border crossers stay home, unwilling to risk their time and money.

The principle of what turns these crises on and then off is as universal as it is simple; it is applicable to all countries and geographies in Europe and elsewhere. Yet policies that start mass migration crises can be only found in leftist playbooks, while policies that end them are found in conservative ones. Sanchez crossed the political divide for about a minute when stealing from Trump served him. No doubt he and his fellow travelers hope no one noticed so they can go back to their own damaging playbook.

Take the U.S.-Mexico border as an example of how this works.

Former President Joe Biden sparked off the worst border crisis in American history, pulling in millions of border crossers from 2021-2025, when he let them all in for years at the border on various kinds of asylum or humanitarian protection claims, as I describe in the second chapter of my book “Overrun.” Millions down trail who learned on social media about the good fortunes of those up-trail enthusiastically laid down their smuggling money bet and surged en masse toward the breach to collect their own almost guaranteed entry-and-stay reward to pay it all back and keep earning.

Trump quickly flipped the switch off with policies that have expelled nearly 100% of new crossers that have been caught. Crucially, he ordered Border Patrol and the U.S. military to catch all they could. Not surprisingly, few down trail who learned about this unwanted up-trail outcome were willing to pay smuggling fees or attempt the trip on their own.

Ceuta now stands as just the latest example where this simple approach, which has played out according to script everywhere it has been applied, including countries like Hungary and Poland.

In the Ceuta case, the North Africans flooded in because of Sanchez’s amnesty offer to legalize a half million illegal aliens, followed by a Spanish Supreme Court ruling that greatly slows Spain’s immigration enforcement for migrants arriving by sea.

But Sanchez’s soldiers found ways to encourage almost all of the recent arrivals to go back to Morocco anyway. Word spread fast about unpalatable outcomes (and that the Spaniards weren’t providing food), and no one down-trail wanted to bother trying.

Crisis ended.

The fact that a leftist, illegal immigration advocate like Sanchez resorted to a Trumpian policy goes to show that political leaders on his side of the spectrum actually understand how to enforce immigration but will resort to proven methods only when a crisis threatens their political power.

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Watch Todd Explain his editorial to Steve Bannon’s War Room posse

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On Fox News’ (Laura) Ingraham Angle: Spain’s Mass Migration Crisis Erupts

On the Chris Cuomo show debating new ICE body cam policy

The most powerful people-magnet on Earth was at the root of last week’s epic mass migration event that swamped Ceuta, Spain’s city enclave on the Moroccan coast: the perceived opportunity among poor laborers to lodge political-persecution asylum claims they know would allow their probable release into rich destination countries, pretty much forever.

What just happened in Spain must serve as a seminal warning to the Trump administration that its admirable work to quiet the U.S. southern border — the same formula Ceuta used to deny migrants the globally coveted asylum claim process — is very far from complete.

Spain’s Supreme Court triggered the human torrent when it struck down a policy uncannily like Trump’s border policy. It promptly expels arriving migrants and denies all a chance to start the lengthy asylum claim process that leads to interior releases. The Spanish court required that Spain adjudicate asylum claims before expulsion.

Trump’s border expulsion and asylum-denial policies, which reduced crossings to historically low levels, are just as legally fragile and politically reversible. The administration can and must use Spain’s misfortune as a catalyst to permanently improve asylum integrity that will forever prevent an American Ceuta. But time to do so is short and dwindling.

The One-Two Punch

On Jan.20, 2025, Trump issued the presidential proclamation “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion.” It triggered U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act section 212(f) to suspend the right of illegal crossers to apply for asylum. That plus orders for Border Patrol and U.S. military personnel to catch and expel every arriving migrant abruptly ended the 2021-2024 mass migration crisis.

It’s all reversible by a court or a new president without the following two-punch combination. First, withdraw the United States from the United Nations treaty, the 1967 “Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees,” which extended to the United States a 1951 global obligation on which to model its current abused asylum law. Second, power-drive several legislative amendments to restore the intent of asylum protection before the next Congress takes office in January 2027.

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Watch Bensman Discuss this editorial on Bannon’s War room

On Steve Bannon’s War Room; Non-Citizen Voting

And: Spain Reminds that US Border Security on “Razor’s Edge” of Flipping that Way

On Rob Schmidtt Tonight: Serf Employment and Haitian Fraudsters

On Fine Point with Mike Howell: The Reality About De-protecting Venezuelans

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As Published July 29, 2026 by The Daily Signal

Conniption fits are convulsing liberal pundits, Democratic Party candidates, and Republican serf-labor advocates over the idea that President Donald Trump is now, finally, cleared to deport some 340,000 Haitians. On Tuesday, the administration followed through on a Supreme Court decision allowing it to terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Haitian nationals.

Their advocates claim that deporting Haitians to “death sentences” in a Haiti run by homicidal gangs is cruel, immoral, un-American, and hurtful to the U.S. home health care industry. On these bases, they are calling on Trump to forget the whole thing and for Congress to quickly pass a law to keep these deportable Haitians here. They’re using their old emotional but false narratives.

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“This means that while these Haitians were working and contributing to our community and economy yesterday, today it is now illegal to employ them,” said Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in one typical statement before he went on to deplore sending Haitians to Haiti. “The violent gangs run most of the country. The government barely functions. And the economy is in shambles. Further, our federal government has an advisory against traveling to Haiti.”

But there’s a big problem with the facts undergirding this hyperbolic lobbying effort.

It’s that most, if not all, of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians whom President Joe Biden let in at the southern border and gave TPS to from 2021 to 2025 were never eligible for it because they’d already been safely resettled for years in third countries and often had legal residency, citizenship, and passports.

That means the Trump administration need not deport them to lawless Haiti at all. They can be returned to countries like Brazil, which already took them in once, or other countries with which the Trump State Department has already penned more than a dozen safe third deportation country agreements across Latin America with more in process.

Many Haitians here know they never needed humanitarian protection in the U.S. but came when they did only because Biden opened the border wide and offered a nice economic and lifestyle upgrade. I too know their TPS was granted under false pretenses because I found thousands of burned, disfigured, and discarded Chilean and Brazilian identity cards left along the Rio Grande.

Why destroy your third-country ID cards and the passports of Children born citizens of countries like Brazil and Chile? Because they’d been coached to know that those documents showing years of legal status in other countries would prove they were ineligible for U.S. TPS, asylum, parole, or any other grace the American immigration system was doling out then under Biden.

That’s not the only evidence I have of this massive fraud on the American people. From 2021 to 2025 as Biden was bringing Haitians in from Chile, Brazil, and other South American safe haven countries, I personally interviewed them by the hundreds on their way up the trails from Colombia to Mexico.

Every single one of them attested to me that they’d been living in either Chile or Brazil for up to a decade before they received Biden’s invitation to richer rewards in the U.S. They were all coming in to make more money while the getting was good. Not a single Haitian I interviewed claimed to fear living in an adoptive country.

How would you compare living the last four years in Santiago, Chile, to Haiti, I once asked a young Haitian man moving north through Costa Rica in 2021, in but one representative interview. He’d been showing me video memories of nightclub life in a favorite coastal resort town.

“A thousand times better,” he promptly answered.

I asked him why he was uprooting his life to cross the American border.

“Because,” he answered, chuckling, “life in the United States will be a million times better.”

Chile had formally taken in about 186,000 Haitian immigrants between 2017 and 2019. Immigrants were attracted by the nation’s prosperous, stable economy and relaxed immigration laws for work permits. The informal presence of untold thousands more was tolerated.

Meanwhile, Haitians made up the largest immigrant nationality in the formal labor market in Brazil. In 2019, Brazilian agencies reported that 128,968 had been welcomed in since 2010 and were issued 90,607 work permits. Thousands more were likely present without status.

About the only true claim in the political storyline is that Haiti is indeed a hellscape. But the Trump administration can, in good conscience, return these wrongly awarded TPS recipients to the comparative nirvanas where they already lived. It might take some diplomatic finesse or even muscle to get countries to take back (or start taking) Haitians.

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IN THE NEWS

On The War Room Again with Steve Bannon: 3 Segments on ICE Mass Deports, Call for Truth Commission, and More

Call for a Presidential Truth Commission on the Biden Border Crisis

Explaining ICE deportation numbers

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Nearly 18 months since President Donald Trump ended the worst mass migration border crisis in American history, terabytes of government emails and records that could teach future generations why and how it happened await liberation.

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The secrets in this trove beg discovery, exploitation and analysis about the great “Biden Border Crisis“ that had millions of foreign nationals (at least 8 million) enter through the U.S. Southwest Border for 45 months between January 2021 and January 2025. Their value to the American national interest? Crucial knowledge that can prevent history from repeating.

But the referenced government material and the testimonies of involved government workers remain unstudied, the preventative value uncollected. That’s why Trump must appoint a presidential commission now that will establish a comprehensive official public record as to what happened.

The Trump administration is, of course, busy repairing the damage with mass deportations and policies to secure the southern border. But it must pause for the longer-range benefit of establishing this border crisis history before the opportunity to prevent the next big one is gone.

Why this, of all things, now?

The great mass migration crisis at the southwest border stands as a transformational event of lasting generational consequence. It affects all Americans in one form or another, beginning with having, by most accounts, decided the 2024 presidential election.

Competing narratives about who carried out which border policies, as well as the ensuing crisis’s magnitude, range of costs and consequences, still fester without a foreseeable end along partisan lines, a permanent state of national dispute. That’s a major problem because history repeats itself when it is not studied, written, absorbed and referenced when needed.

The reason a commission must form now, before Trump leaves office in January 2029, is to ensure there is enough time for records excavators, analysts, researchers and writers to complete the job before a less amenable president enters office and the preventative learning opportunity is lost forever.

A presidential commission is the only option

For the last 150 years, relatively trusted presidential and congressional commissions have cleared the national air of damaging conspiracy theories and public disputes over consequential events in American life. Policymakers often found they could justify action when facts were supported by evidence and generally accepted.

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BENSMAN IN THE NEWS

Fox & Friends: ICE Tactics

The Jack Kelley Show: ICE Deportations

Brannon Howse Show, WorldTube: Inside Trump’s Mass Deportation Program

NewsNation Morning in America with Marki Martin: ICE Traffic Stop Arrests

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Praise is due to a recent Trump administration push to nail immigration lawyers for the broadly undeterred crime of running mass asylum fraud schemes, which have let huge volumes of ineligible illegal aliens into the country.

The asylum system has long acted as a powerful magnet for aspiring illegal border crossers and visa overstayers, because, until President Donald Trump sharply curtailed its use, merely claiming asylum verbally allowed millions of ineligible foreigners into the country almost indefinitely.

But targeting lawyers with fines is more of a beginning than a finish. To prevent the next mass migration crisis, we need the whole world to feel real asylum fraud deterrence. That means the Trump Department of Justice, headed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, must prosecute and imprison individual claimants, known in the business as “single scope” cases. These would be just the average foreign economic migrants who, perhaps coached online or by friends and relatives, lied under oath on U.S. government forms, to federal agents, and to immigration court judges, claiming that they suffered asylum-eligible government persecution back home.

Claiming government persecution that never happened to gain asylum and its attendant public welfare and work authorization is a prosecutable felony crime.

The problem is that appointed U.S. Attorneys in all 94 offices have never wanted, and won’t take, such cases unless told to. The time for that is now.

Acting A.G. Blanche should appoint a “Special Attorney” (under 28 USC 543) to elevate asylum fraud prosecutions against individual aliens to a high-tier priority nationwide and within Department of Homeland Security component agencies. They won’t want to do it because presidentially appointed U.S. Attorneys don’t regard busting individual aliens for criminal asylum-lying as worth the squeeze, so they decline most criminal referrals that come their way. That roadblock in turn disincentivizes investigations by the responsible agencies: ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS). After all, why would any HSI or FDNS agent bother investigating crimes they know prosecutors will ignore?

This (somewhat dated) December 2015 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report details how the processing blockage serves non-lawyer individuals who commit asylum fraud.

According to the report, U.S. Attorneys had long preferred to see individual suspects of asylum fraud “not generally criminally prosecuted.” In turn, the agents of HSI “felt constrained because…prosecuting asylum fraud is a low priority for the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

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Until very recently, FDNS could not directly refer their own fraud cases to U.S. Attorneys; the old policy required them to ask HSI agents to do it for them. HSI would reject FDNS cases, which, in turn, dampened FDNS interest in originating investigations. It’s a vicious, feckless circle.

FDNS officers in six of eight asylum offices, the GAO report stated, reported that HSI declined their case referrals and, for those the agency did accept, would close them without further investigation. As a result, half of the eight FDNS offices referred either zero or only one fraud case to HSI from 2010 to 2014.

One HSI office had not accepted an FDNS referral in two years because the area’s U.S. Attorney’s Office would only accept asylum fraud referrals involving at least 100 asylum applications, a circumstance that provides for sentencing enhancements, the report stated, which prosecutors love. Another asylum office reported that its U.S. Attorney had accepted no asylum fraud referrals in five years.

“Because HSI does not prioritize investigations of single instances of asylum fraud, FDNS immigration officers we interviewed in seven of the eight asylum offices stated they generally do not submit single-scope cases…” the report stated.

Skill atrophy was another cost. A 2008 GAO survey of all the nation’s then-256 asylum officers and 56 supervisors in the nation’s eight USCIS division field offices found the majority felt themselves ill-trained to detect fraud or assess the credibility of asylum seekers. Seventy percent confessed they found it moderately or very difficult to identify document fraud and could not assess credibility in more than half the cases they adjudicated.

While these reports have aged, sources inside FDNS and USCIS told me recently that nothing has changed in the nearly 10 years since, despite the unprecedented mass border crossings of 10 million foreign nationals and a related surge in asylum claims from 172,000 in 2019 to 860,000 in 2024. A great many of those were no doubt filed by people encouraged by the knowledge that they would face no consequence for lying.

This must be fixed.

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AUSTIN, Texas – The close timing of two high-casualty earthquakes in Venezuela on June 24 and a June 25 Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump Administration to deport some 605,000 US-based Venezuelans has given rise to a mounting pressure campaign arguing that President Trump must, on moral grounds, let them stay.

Seizing on one tragic event where some 100 just-deported Venezuelans died in the quakes, pro-illegal immigration activists, human rights groups like the Venezuelan American Caucus, Democratic lawmakers, and mid-term candidates are pushing a narrative that is bleeding into political campaigns as a real issue. The objective is to virtue-shame President Trump into reactivating the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that had shielded Venezuelans from deportation and which the Supreme Court revoked. Their underlying argument goes pretty much like this:

“It is unthinkable to send children and families, who have committed no crimes, into a country plunged into chaos by natural disaster,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who is running for reelection, wrote in a Facebook post.

This voice-cracking cry to save Venezuelans from Earthquake chaos is gaining traction, though the administration has resisted demands to restore TPS. But the argument is an easily debunked false dilemma based on inaccurate premises. The truth is that most of the deportable Venezuelans need not be shipped anywhere near the smoking rubble of shaken Caracas.

Most Venezuelans let in after crossing the southern border during Biden’s term were already firmly resettled in 17 foster countries, where more than seven million had lived safely for many years, often legally, even prosperously, and far from any earthquake epicenter, according to planning documents for a sprawling United Nations Commission on Human Rights’ “Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan” (RMRP) resettlement program launched in 2017 to address the exodus.

The administration could continue deportation flights to Venezuela because, of course, the earthquakes devastated only parts of the capital and La Guaira State on the coast; the rest of the country is its normal self. But the administration could airlift the 600,000 much faster and in perfectly good conscience to many of those 17 original host governments and even offer the deportees their choice of country, neutralizing the “inhumanity!” claim.

The seven million Venezuelans began their exodus in about 2015, fleeing Venezuela’s economic collapse under the socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro. Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Brazil topped the long list of resettled Venezuelans and still do, the UN’s RMRP reports. (See the 2026 RMRP document here).

Up to a million departed these kind nations because Joe Biden’s open borders policies offered an irresistible chance at an American lifestyle upgrade, which is not a legally eligible claim for temporary protection. If anything, the omission of last country of long-term residency constitutes fraud.

Ready and Willing Foster Countries Next Door

No one knows how many of the US-based Venezuelans came from which countries. That’s because US Customs and Border Protection tracks aliens by country of citizenship, not last residence, making it easy to omit they’d been safe and sound for years, ineligibly for TPS. Not that anyone ever asked.

We know a substantial majority were firmly resettled, in part, because 99 percent of the many hundreds of Venezuelans I interviewed along the migration trails during those years told me they hadn’t lived in their home country in five, seven, or even 10 years. (See the video U.S. Enabling Mass Asylum and Humanitarian Permit Fraud at the Southern Border). I’m not alone; pro-illegal immigration activists know it too.

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On June 30, I departed the Trump Administration after 13 months serving as Senior Adviser to the Border Czar, ICE Office of Director in DC, and the National Counter-terrorism Center (McLean, Va.) I left to take a rare opportunity to join The Heritage Foundation, the nation’s most venerable and influential public policy think tank, as Senior Research Fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center.

Brannon Howse, an independent broadcaster with a large loyal following, first discovered and interviewed me for his live audience in about 2021 while I was on a reporting trip in the deep southern Mexican border city of Tapachula next to Guatemala, hundreds of immigrants swarming all around me. Over the following years, he’s had me on too many times to count and his audience noticed when I disappeared into the Administration’s cone of media silence. So when Brannon heard I was OUT, he immediately contacted me to go on the air again. I felt a little rusty after 13-14 months of no media and maybe it shows here. But, as the old saying goes, there’s only UP from here.

Note to previous and new subscribers: From here on, I’ll use Substack to alert my free subscribers and followers of my reports, op-eds, and media appearances for Heritage. I will not ask for money. The “paid subscription” option is OFF. I do this mainly to drive interested readers to my writing.

As to find out where all that resides, you can bookmark this (currently empty) page at Heritage to stay abreast of my reports (some are on the way!) or visit www.toddbensman.com to peruse the full body of my work from years past.

On June 30, I departed the Trump Administration after 13 months serving as Senior Adviser to the Border Czar, ICE Office of Director in DC, and the National Counter-terrorism Center (McLean, Va.) I left to take a rare opportunity to join The Heritage Foundation, the nation’s most venerable and influential public policy think tank, as Senior Research Fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center. Note to previous subscribers of mine: From here on, I’ll use Substack to alert my free subscribers and followers of my reports, op-eds, and media appearances for Heritage. You can bookmark this page at Heritage to stay abreast of my reports or visit www.toddbensman.com to peruse the full body of my work.

I feel extremely proud to have served this country in a material way, far from my Texas home and family in Texas. The opportunity to accomplish good things for our country was one of the highest honors of my life and certainly ranks as one of the most interesting. The parting happened on good terms, and it was with a dash of sadness that professional opportunity and family called. I leave the government and National Counterterrorism Center with no complaints and only good will, because their success is all of our success. I also leave with excitement for this next chapter of my professional life at Heritage, where I will continue my coverage of all things border, immigration policy, and terrorism threats to the homeland. Following is the June 30, 2026 Heritage press release and some pics from my 13 months with the Trump administration:

Heritage Foundation Welcomes New Senior Research Fellow for Heritage Border Security and Immigration Center

Jun 30, 2026 1 min read

WASHINGTON—The Heritage Foundation welcomes Todd Bensman as a new Senior Research Fellow for the Heritage Foundation Border Security and Immigration Center, where he will support Heritage’s mission to defend American national security and the rule of law.

Director of the Heritage Border Security and Immigration Center, Lora Ries, welcomed Bensman to the team, stating:

“I am thrilled to have Todd join our Heritage team. He brings a rare combination of border, immigration, and national security expertise along with old-school journalism curiosity and investigative skills. Together with his excellent writing and speaking skills, Todd will be a great educator and advocate for needed policies to protect our homeland.”

Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security, added:

“American national security depends on secure borders and the faithful enforcement of our immigration laws. Todd Bensman joins our Border Security and Immigration team with decades of leadership and expertise on these critical issues, and we’re proud to welcome him as we continue working toward solutions that safeguard American security and sovereignty for decades to come.”

Todd Bensman remarked on his appointment:

“By now, most Americans well know that immigration and border security policy is firmly entrenched as an apex priority among all American domestic and foreign policy concerns. That top-tier positioning won’t change anytime soon. I look forward to helping clarify these often-complex issues and, especially, helping Americans navigate the unprecedented partisan information warfare that always swirls around them. I am honored to join a venerable, influential organization such as The Heritage Foundation and look forward to advancing its mission to provide information necessary to help make this great country greater.”

For more than three decades, Bensman has built a distinguished career at the intersection of national security, border security, and immigration. Most recently, he served as a senior adviser supporting the Administration’s border security agenda, following seven years as a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. Earlier in his career, he led intelligence and counterterrorism efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety, working closely with federal law enforcement and intelligence partners to identify and respond to emerging security threats.

Bensman has authored two books examining border security and immigration policy and has testified before Congress. He can be seen on Fox Business, C-SPAN, Epoch Times, Fox News, and more.