DHS has resumed CBP One flights after OIG found fraud; threat posed by Tren de Aragua is real (Blaze News Tonight, 30 August 2024)

A. S. MARTIN, MA JD
AUG 31

The program is ostensibly for people from who seek entry to the United States on “humanitarian” grounds, though they lack the ability to obtain a visa.

There are “a lot of terrible things about this program,” Todd Bensman, Senior Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Blaze News Tonight. “Chief among them, the American people can’t see it happening.”

Bensman said the program “has brought 550,000 people directly into U.S. airports” as an alternative to illegally crossing the border — “which you can see, and object to, and seek redress from your leaders about.

“But if they’re flying in, you can’t really tell the difference between someone who’s coming from one of those countries or someone who’s flying domestically.”

Bensman criticized the program not only for its lax application process, but also because while it is presented as a humanitarian program, similar to a refugee resettlement program, it lacks statutory authorization from Congress. “You can’t just create an admissions program for immigrants abroad, of this size, and not have Congressional approval,” Bensman said. “And that’s exactly what they did.”

Bensman said the Center for Immigration Studies uncovered details about the program from Customs and Border Protection through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request which required follow-up litigation.

“It’s supposed to be a humanitarian rescue program,” he said. “They’re bringing them in on humanitarian grounds, to protect them from some harm. And our FOIA request found they’re flying in from the hottest vacation wonderlands in the world. They’re flying in from the safest, best, richest countries in the world — Germany, France, Italy, Spain. Iceland! Flying in from Fiji, Australia. 

“So, if that’s a humanitarian rescue program, to me, that’s the fraud. Nobody’s really paying attention to that fraud. And I guarantee you, they haven’t fixed that.”

Bensman explained that DHS’s rationale for the creation of the program was “to decongest the physical land border, where you have hundreds of thousands illegally crossing.” According to Bensman, DHS claims “if they can prevent people from using smugglers to get to the border, then it’s safer. And that complies with their safe, orderly, humane mass migration policy. It’s not to block, stop and deter, like normal countries, and normal governments. It’s to usher them in, in a safer, more orderly way.

“And that’s just way outside any kind of norm, at all,” he said.

The fraud DHS’s Office of Inspector General found in the CBP One program related to the U.S. sponsors. “In order to apply for this, you have to show that you have somebody in the U.S. who’s going to support you financially when you get here. But there’s no requirement that they financially support you. There’s no enforcement. So, they don’t have to financially support you, they just have to attest to it.”

But according to Bensman, “it was the sponsorship part of this that was riddled with fraud.” The OIG report found the same sponsors were attempting to sponsor hundreds of people.

“They claim that they’ve fixed it,” Bensman said. “But I’m telling you, nobody is addressing the fraud that is the underlying premise of the program — which is that it’s a humanitarian rescue program! And they’re bringing in people from France? Give me a break. We had a year-long court battle with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they would not tell us the departure airports.”

Bensman believes the reason CBP tried to withhold the names of the departure cities — which he finally did receive in the FOIA lawsuit settlement — was “because the countries they’re flying from are not places that anybody needs rescuing from.”

Blaze News Tonight asked Bensman to comment on the controversy over whether or not members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken control of an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. The state’s governor Jared Polis said the claim is the figment of a city councilwoman’s “imagination.”

“There’s video out there,” Bensman said. “I’ve seen the video. Is someone saying that it’s doctored, or photoshopped or something?”

Bensman pointed to news reports of Tren de Aragua activity elsewhere in the U.S. “It’s not just Aurora. There are other cities that are reporting in their regular mainstream newspapers that there are these big problem areas that have developed involving that gang from Venezuela conducting large amounts of crime.”

Bensman explained how heavily-tattooed gang members and others with criminal records have been able to enter the United States due to Biden Harris administration border policies.

“For a long time — three years — Border Patrol agents were gang-pressed into processing in immigrants that turn themselves over to them, when they cross the border, knowing that they’re going to get processed in,” Bensman said. “So there’s no Border Patrol manning the line anywhere else.

“And the ones who can’t turn themselves in — typically because they have criminal histories or they’ve been deported a bunch of times, or they know they’ve got something that’s going to get found out when they go through the fingerprint check. They’re running through. And getting through. Two million gotaways.”

Bensman said that “runners” or “gotaways” are “the people that you least want to have in your country,” because there’s a high probably they have a criminal record.

“That’s why you find out, after somebody gets murdered, that the guy that did it had been deported six times, and was under a removal order already. He probably just ran through the gaps that were left behind by Border Patrol while they were processing in the ones that don’t have criminal records.

“Not yet, anyway.”