Washington, D.C., March 02, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Video, transcript, and podcast are now available from the Center for Immigration Studies’ recent panel on America’s historic border crisis, featuring three reporters who have experienced the crisis firsthand. The conversation centered around a new book, “OVERRUN: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History”, authored by Todd Bensman – the Center’s Texas-based Senior National Security Fellow and a former counterterrorism intelligence practitioner and journalist.

Bensman was joined by Chuck Holton, a freelance correspondent who resides in Panama, and Charlotte Cuthbertson, a senior reporter for the Epoch Times. Their on-the-ground reporting far from Washington, D.C. – in Central America, Mexico, and along the U.S.-Mexico border – reflects the stories and actions of the primary sources: the migrants, law enforcement, and the residents impacted by the millions of foreign nationals illegally crossing America’s borders.

One of the effects of the border crisis has been a massive influx of cash to Mexican cartels. According to Bensman, “Never have Mexico’s ruthless crime syndicates and their paramilitary forces earned so much money from their control of the crossings and from smuggling. And for the first time in memory, the cartel proceeds from this smuggling event are said to have surpassed those from drug smuggling. And prior to this, they might have made, 500 million (dollars) a year. Now they’re up to as high as $13 billion a year. All that money is going to buy what? Weapons, equipment, and influence in Mexico. Not good for U.S. national security.”

Charlotte Cuthbertson, who reports on the Texas border while living in a small border town, expresses concern over those illegal migrants who aren’t apprehended. The Border Patrol estimates that there were 1.2 million to 1.5 million “got-aways” in the last two years, aliens whose entry was detected by the Border Patrol but who were not apprehended. “The got-away population does include criminals that have committed crimes all over the states,” she said. “They’re not staying at the border. They’re going everywhere.”

Chuck Holton, who has reported extensively on immigration throughout South and Central America and Mexico, describes the human toll of the Biden administration’s policy of incentivizing people to enter the country illegally. Of the migrants that make the six-day trek through Panama’s Darien Gap, he estimates that “between 10 percent and even a little more than that of the people who go in there did not come out again.”

The transcript for this panel is now available here. The panel recording was also re-released as an episode of the Center’s podcast, Parsing Immigration Policy, available here.