by Isabeel van Brugen and Joshua Philipp
President Joe Biden’s mixed messaging on immigration is partially to blame for the violence and bloodshed between migrants and Mexican law enforcement near the southern border, according to a national security fellow.
Todd Bensman senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies told EpochTV’s Crossroads program that he personally witnessed a violent clash between a caravan of migrants trying to pass north to reach the U.S. border through Mexico, and law enforcement trying to hold them back.
He explained that Mexican authorities typically stretch a cord across a road where caravans are coming, and they meet them wearing riot gear and helmets.
“The migrants will put their toughest, youngest gangsters up front, with rocks, bottles, sticks, with nails in them and everything else, and they will charge at the soldiers,” said Bensman, author of “America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.”
“There will be full out clashes in the street. And a lot of times it works, they bust through and then all the women and children and everybody else just pours through and they’re in, they get through.”
Bensman said that in the clash he witnessed, there was a “surprise attack.”
“Mexicans were hiding in the bushes and all along the road, and then on the signal, they all just pounced behind them and in front of them. They [law enforcement] beat them silly. I mean, there’s no other way to say it,” he recalled.
“There was a lot of blood and they brought in buses and with billy clubs, beat them all onto the buses, and turned those buses around and shipped them back to Tapachula detention center,” Bensman said, “That’s the cycle down there.”
“The bloodshed spilled in those clashes really is because of the Biden administration,” added Bensman.
Biden, who campaigned in part on rescinding his predecessor’s immigration orders, not only halted construction of the wall at the border but ended the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which forced many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their claims were heard.
The Biden administration rolled back a number of key Trump-era policies shortly after taking office, including halting construction of the border wall, trying to end the MPP program, and curtailing the use of pandemic powers to allow all illegal immigrant children who arrive without a responsible adult to stay in the United States.