The time has come to acknowledge and comprehend that America is weathering the worst mass border migration event in the nation’s history. Millions of foreign nationals have overrun the southern border, starting on Inauguration Day in 2021, and millions more will cross over by the end of President Joe Biden’s term in 2024. This event is historic by all measures, exceeding even the storied chronicles of Ellis Island, and portends the same permanent change for the nation. Unfortunately, a fog of a fierce partisan information war obscures that it is even happening as well as basic truths Americans desperately need to have about this historic event. Radical ideologues, whose ideas even the modern Democratic Party had always rejected, gained power in 2021 and, with impunity, implemented an extreme reality-divorced theology about immigration. Americans never voted for their experiment or the irrevocable consequences that immediately waylaid a surprised nation.
But the American electorate has upcoming chances in the election booth to reclaim their say. This book provides what is needed now: reporting-based analysis that will lay bare this crushing ongoing emergency’s causes, dimensions, and chaotic impacts so as to finally illuminate the pathway out of it. Here is ground zero of the human tsunami that smashed into America and is still washing into all fifty states with permanent consequences. It is a true story that can be found nowhere else because it comes from the author’s frontline reportage throughout the borderlands and all along the migration trails in Central America from its first days. Its primary sources are not “experts,” politicians and media pundits, but the witnesses to this history, the immigrants at its core.
Todd Bensman currently serves as the Texas-based Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a Washington, D.C. policy institute for which he writes, speaks, and grants media interviews about the nexus between immigration and national security. For nearly a decade prior to joining CIS in August 2018, Bensman led counterterrorism intelligence for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division and its multi-agency fusion center. Before his homeland security service, Bensman was a journalist for twenty-three years, covering national security after 9/11 as a staff writer for major newspapers. He earned accolades—such as two National Press Club awards—for his border reporting. Bensman holds an MA in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School, Center for Homeland Defense and Security (2015, Outstanding Thesis designee). He also holds an MA in journalism from the University of Missouri School of Journalism (2009) and an undergraduate degree in journalism with honors from Northern Arizona University.