After months of mounting pressure to take action to address the record-breaking flood of migrants pouring across the Southern border, President Biden signed an executive order this week, and it sparked immediate criticism from both Republicans and Democrats and threats of lawsuits from the ACLU. In this episode, we talk with immigration expert Todd Benzman about the blowback to Biden's order and whether it will make any difference in the historic border crisis taking place under his watch. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Saturday, June eighth, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Todd Benzman, Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History. Todd, thanks for coming on. Now, on Tuesday, President Biden announced an executive order that he says would secure the border order. What are the details of this order?

Well, it codifies that 2,500 illegal aliens a day will be allowed to cross and be accepted into the country and released quickly to apply for asylum. Then it says that if it goes above that, they can implement these draconian expulsion policies where they'll push everybody back into Mexico to go through a port of entry, you probably using the a CBP One app to get parole. But the problem is that there are exceptions to the rule that swallow the whole rule. One of which is that when we're about to expel you, we're going to ask you a question, are you afraid to return to Mexico? And if the answer is yes, boom, you're in. So of course, everybody's going to say yes to that, and they'll all be in. So there's a lot of discretionary conduct possible when it comes to the enforcement part of this. That's the second problem with it. The first problem with it is that it somehow normalizes and allows 2,500 people a day to come in, which, if you do the math, comes out to hundreds and hundreds of thousands. And then the ones that are to be pushed back over are then going to be allowed in under parole to be crossed in over the bridges.

So just as many people that get pushed back are still going to be coming into the country anyway, maybe a little bit later, a couple of weeks or whatever. So the American people, in a broad sense, would find all of this too arcane and complicated to really understand how it all really works, why there are these exceptions that swallow the rule, why just as many people will be coming in, why they're talking tough but actually acting lenient and weak on the border, and why nothing really will change, and why this is really, in my view, this is a campaign maneuver, a trick, to come off sounding tough so that they can blame the Republicans for not passing that bill, that big Senate bill, Langeford, drafted that Democrats seem to think as the panacea, but which actually would codify even more mass migration to come in. That's what this is really about. They're sledgehammering the Republicans with that thing, and they're about to do it again.

Yeah, I wanted to address that bill. The White House is trying to blame Republicans for Biden's limited actions here, pointing out that Republicans twice voted down this, quote, unquote, bipartisan immigration bill. Why did Republicans reject it?

Well, the first reason is that it would have normalized 5,000 illegal entries every single day. It codified that as legislation, which essentially reverses the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which says zero are allowed to come in illegally. So that's the first nonstarter that it would allow millions of people a year to illegally cross the border, supplanting the current number, which is zero, at least as a goal. Number two is it also promised draconian pushback and expulsion measures, fast tracking asylum, trying to clear backlogs, adding border patrol agents, et cetera. But It was riven with the same exceptions that swallow the whole rule. For example, if you say you're afraid to return to Mexico, we let you in. We're going to fast track the asylum process from years to 180 days, but there's no detention involved. So everybody that comes in for the shorter 180 days is free to disappear, and they will, and do, all of them, just disappear. And that there's no interior deportation, really. They say things like everybody will be subject to deportation, but it gives the administration this wide discretion as to really actually put them on planes and fly them home, which, as we've seen, they choose not to do.

Also, it would have replaced the INA, which, if Trump gets elected, would have tied his feet and hands to be able to do anything. It would have made it extremely difficult to actually secure the border when the time comes because there'd be this big piece of legislation you'd have to overcome and undo. And so for all these different reasons, it was an absolutely unacceptable bill. Again, the American people don't understand, can't really differentiate very easily between the rhetoric of this was a great bill to bring us all the tools we need to secure the border when the exact opposite is actually true.

Now, you mentioned deportation. What are the numbers? Do we know how many illegal border crossers the Biden administration has actually deported?

I don't have it in front of me. They do provide a number, but the numbers that they provide, which are in the hundreds of thousands, if I recall, are deceptive because a huge number of the people that are being removed are Mexicans. Probably the majority are Mexicans, and they're counting the ones that are turned around at the border. And then the Mexicans just come right back in an hour later somewhere else. And so a huge number of them, because they're Mexicans, are able to just return. And it's not a deterrent for Mexicans. But for the people that are from the 160 other countries, Venezuela, et cetera, those people are largely not being returned. There may be some, but not in sufficient numbers to create a real deterrence. Whereas if you spend the money and go through the time and trouble to cross our border to know that there's an 80 % chance that we're going to turn you right around and fly you all the way back to Columbia or wherever you came from, that you won't come in the first place. That's what you call credible deterrence, consequence-based deterrence. And it works. So it depends on which nationalities you're talking about.

And in the meantime, we're providing these parole programs, probably pushing close to a million people now in the last year and a few months that have been flown directly or been allowed to fly directly from foreign airports into American ones with two-year work permits that are renewable online. And another 500,000 being allowed to cross on parole over the landpoints. And nobody can even see any of this. It's invisible to the public eye. So when they do return people or expel them, it's usually with the instruction that They get in line for parole for the CBP-1, and before too long, they'll be in any way.

You mentioned the 160 countries represented by people illegally crossing the border. We saw a recent reporting from Bill Malugin at Fox News videotaping guys from Mauritania, a terror-risk country, and they were just walking casually across the border. What risk does this opening up of the border pose to the American people?

Well, according to FBI Director Chris Ray, a very significant risk of terror attack from the border. And according to the Department of Homeland Security's 2024 threat assessment, which is online, you can Google it and read it, the border situation right now has created elevated vulnerability to terror attack. And recently, I've written about a Jordanian border crosser who conducted a vehicle ramming attack on a military base outside Washington, DC, the month after he entered with another Jordanian who was a visa overstay. But this guy entered over the Southern border, and one of the two of them was on the terror watch list, according to other reporting. And that's the thing that I think is we can expect to happen more often. As of today, I've got a piece that will detail a Another terrorism case of a Russian who came from the region of Chechnya, crossed the Southern border, and immediately began plotting to send money to Alnusra front in Syria, and he did. Buying weapons and combat motorcycles. The FBI said that had he not been arrested in February 2021, that he would have conducted a terror attack himself here. That case has never been I'll be writing about that.

For the first time, he was just convicted in January. He pleaded guilty, and he just received a 12-year sentence in May. In all the DOJ press releases about this case and in all the media reporting, nobody even one time reported that he had crossed the Southern border.

So no reporting on that at all. I mean, it's hard not to conclude that that's a deliberate cover up to protect the administration administration in this border crisis situation.

Yeah, I would totally go there.

Now, to return to the executive order, we saw the ACLU and other leftist groups immediately threatened to file lawsuits against the order. Does it even have a chance of actually being implemented by the Biden administration?

Well, I don't believe that there was ever any intention to implement this thing. I think it's a device, and I've gone on the record, I believe it to be a political maneuver that was probably engineered by the Biden administration with its allies who are suing right now to actually lawsuit it to death immediately so that they can then turn around and blame the Republicans for killing that bill that they needed so badly. In time for the televised debate coming up. If you read the White House fact sheet on this that was published, you'll note that it is infused with references to that Lankford bill that the Republicans killed twice now. I believe that they put this thing up to be able to say, God, look, the Republicans are forcing us into these impossible places that we're trying our best. We're doing everything we can to close this border. And the Republicans just keep blocking us because they want a festering wound that hurts America so that they can gain power in the November election. That's their narrative. That narrative has proven very, very impactful It's effective. You can see pundits and media personalities constantly cite it.

It is a major Democratic talking point going into the election. And I think this has galvanized a lot of media attention. Here we are talking about it here. They're talking about it everywhere right now, just in time for Biden to be able to throw his hands up publicly in the next couple of days and go, Oh, God, if only we had that bill that the Republicans killed. That's what I think is going on here. The lawsuit was part of it. I believe that was probably engineered, arranged ahead of time between all those parties. Please sue us. Please, please, please sue us. Don't waste any time so that we can get on with our show.

Final question. We've seen record illegal immigration under Biden. It's not even close to anything we've seen in recent decades. Did this just happen to happen on his watch because of a confluence of events globally, or does he own this crisis?

Well, I've written a whole book about this that documents painstakingly how his campaign promises in in 2019, galvanized and incited the entire world to start marching on the US border, and that they were all right there on the border on inauguration day when the policies implemented, and that on that very day, they began rushing through by the hundreds of thousands. So I don't believe that there was some big sudden climate change move that happened on inauguration day or a big hurricane struck that day in Central America or that everything just went to hell in a handbasket in 150 different countries around the world on inauguration day. They were policies. And I buttress my thesis on that with hundreds and hundreds of interviews with immigrants while I was in Mexico and Central America who told me point blank, over and over again, the reason I'm coming and I'm coming now is because they're letting us in. Now they're letting us in, whereas the day before, they were not letting us in. And it's just that simple.

Well, Todd, thank you so much for talking with us. That was Todd Benzman, Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration And this has been an extra edition of MorningWire.