ctr for immigration studies
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see krikorian MTG doge testimony 6 25
wow resurrected for pjt 2025
see tanton FAIR main mini eco sys?
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6 25
mark Krikorian (born 1960 or 1961)[1] is an American activist who has been the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an American anti-immigration think tank. Since 1995. Krikorian has been a contributor to National Review, a conservative publication.[2] Krikorian is credited with popularizing the concept of illegal immigrant self-deportation with the term "attrition through enforcement",[3] and is an advisor to Project 2025,[4] a right-wing conservative political initiative by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Early life and education
Krikorian was born in the United States to American-born parents of Armenian descent from the (former) Soviet Republic. His father worked as a chef and restaurant manager, moving his family from New Haven, to Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and then Boston again, always living in densely Armenian neighborhoods.[5] His parents spoke to their children in Armenian but to each other in English. Krikorian knew only Armenian when he entered kindergarten.[5] He lost his right eye to a retinal blastoma while still a baby.[5]
He earned his B.A. at Georgetown University and a master's at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, further spending two years studying at the Yerevan State University in then-Soviet Armenia.[6][5]
Career
Krikorian was an editor at the Winchester Star, a local newspaper in Virginia, and worked as editor of an electronic media publication on marketing. He wrote for the monthly newsletter of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, before joining CIS in February 1995.[5] A comment in one of his articles in the National Review was called misogynistic; he had said about President Obama that he was "an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates".[7]
In January 2013, ABC News listed Krikorian as one of the top 20 immigration experts to follow on Twitter in the United States.[8] In September 2024 Krikorian testified before Congress, being questioned about comments he made about Haiti, which he said was "so screwed up because it wasn't colonized long enough".[4]
The Epoch Times
More Terror Suspects Reaching the US: Here Are ‘Known Unknowns’ of the Border Crisis
U.S. Border Patrol agents cut an opening in razor wire at the U.S.-Mexico border early in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Sept. 29, 2023. (John Moore/Getty Images)
James Varney
RealClearInvestigations
By James Varney and RealClearInvestigations
11/2/2023
Updated:
11/6/2023
News Analysis
Hundreds of people on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist have almost certainly slipped into the United States amid millions of other illegal immigrants during the past three years, according to former federal officials and experts.
“You have to be extremely naïve to not be significantly concerned about this,” said Rodney Scott, chief of U.S. Border Patrol from 2020 to 2021. “Regardless of what the Biden administration may claim, what it said during the campaign and the executive orders taken in January 2021 have been interpreted around the world as ‘The border is open.’ You’re insane if you don’t think terrorists will use that to their advantage.”
In the aftermath of Hamas’s terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, President Joe Biden, without mentioning the border, told “60 Minutes” that the threat the United States could face from terrorists in the country had escalated.
Although the terrorist threat linked to the border crisis is impossible to quantify, some experts find the available numbers alarming. During President Biden’s first three years in office, a record-shattering 6.5 million-plus immigrants have been “encountered” by border authorities. That pace is increasing: The most recent monthly figures, September’s, showed another record number of monthly encounters—269,735.
At the same time, federal officials have seen an alarming increase in border crossers listed on the U.S. Terror Screening Dataset, the official name for what is commonly called the “terrorist watchlist.”
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In fiscal 2023, which ended in October, Border Patrol agents apprehended 172 such people, all but three of them along the southwest border. When all U.S. places of entry are added—by land, sea and air—another 564 people on the watchlist were caught, bringing the total to 736.
By way of comparison, between fiscal 2017 and 2019, Border Patrol agents apprehended a total of 11 people on the terrorist watchlist. Mr. Scott sounded an alarm to Congress in the 2021 period when the total jumped to 16. “When a number doubles, it gets your attention, and we’ve moved way beyond that,” he said more recently.
Yet the “known unknowns,” to use Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s famous phrase, indicate the problem is even worse, according to experts. For one, the “terrorist watchlist” is only as good as the information that has been entered into it.
“Not everybody’s on the watchlist,” said Todd Bensman, who has tracked Central American immigration routes and the southern border for years with the Center for Immigration Studies and is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
“There have been thousands and thousands—tens of thousands—of people from the Middle East who have entered, and it’s completely reasonable, even the president has acknowledged it, to worry that some of those could be, or could become, terrorist threats,” Mr. Bensman said.
Mr. Scott, who spent a half decade in counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security before moving to Customs and Border Patrol, said that as legal immigration channels dried up, criminals and terrorists began to seek people who would not appear on any intelligence agency’s datasheet.
“They’re looking for what they call ‘clean skins,’” Mr. Scott told RealClearInvestigations (RCI). “People with no type of record who can operate freely. They are continuously looking for new channels they can exploit, and they’ve shifted their ports of entry and increased those coming with no prior record.”
Mark Morgan, a former chief operating officer and commissioner with Customs and Border Patrol, echoed that point, telling RCI that “the fact someone isn’t on that list could just mean they haven’t dipped their toe in the pond yet.”
Using a hypothetical, Mr. Morgan said border authorities might ask a 30-year-old man from Lebanon if he has any association with Hezbollah and in some rare cases do a check with the country of origin.
“What’s he going to say? And not every other country has precise, up-to-date information or maybe a good relationship with the United States,” he said. “We can’t even verify the ones we encounter.”
But experts warn that the number of “encounters” is only the known part of the equation. Far more frightening, they say, are the unknown numbers who have sneaked into the country.
Through the use of surveillance videos from blimps, drones, and satellites, along with old-fashioned gumshoe work of studying footprints, CBP produces a figure it calls “known gotaways.” That stands at 1.7 million during the Biden administration. Mr. Morgan said he considers the “absolute floor” for the real figure to be the public number plus 20 percent.
That would put the total over 2 million. Those unknown hundreds of thousands are uniquely disquieting, in part because so many took measures to dodge border patrol agents. Most current border crossers know that under the Biden administration’s policies, if they surrender at the border, they can apply for amnesty or some other favored status and will simply be processed and released to await a distant court date. Thus, most people trekking into the U.S. from Mexico now give themselves up, or simply sit down on U.S. soil and await Border Patrol, according to current and former agents.
“And they’ve lost track of people that already came in,” Mr. Scott said.
He and others said it stands to reason that people on the terror watchlist would be far less likely to give themselves up. Instead of becoming an encounter, many are probably “gotaways.”
It isn’t clear whether either DHS or CBP has issued new directives or policies since President Biden said he planned to meet with them after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks. The agencies declined to comment on specific policies. Joshua Trevino, with the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, told RCI there does not appear to have been any change in operations on the ground in Texas.
“Nothing has been made public, which is probably because they haven’t done anything,” he said.
CBP does not break down the nationalities of those it encounters, although immigrants from 180 of the world’s 195 recognized nations have been encountered at U.S. borders in the past three years, according to Mr. Morgan. Mr. Scott said San Diego officers told him they have dealt with 200 languages this year.
A San Diego ‘Situational Awareness’ Bulletin
In one sign of the growing concern, the Daily Caller reported on Oct. 25 that an internal bulletin from CBP’s San Diego office warned that “foreign fighters of Israel-Hamas conflict may potentially be encountered at southwest border.”
Specifically, the “situational awareness” bulletin cautioned about those with ties to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
CBP did not dispute the accuracy of the report but declined to comment on internal documents. A spokesperson told RCI that to date, “CBP has seen no indication of Hamas-directed foreign fighters seeking to make entry to the United States.”
The potential threats are twofold: fighters sponsored or directed by terrorist groups, such as those cited in the San Diego bulletin, and people who may have some sympathies with radical Islamic groups and are prompted to act by the war.
To some extent, the former has already occurred, Mr. Bensman said, pointing to a federal case that concluded in April. Former al-Qaeda fighter Shihab Ahmed Shihab pleaded guilty in Ohio to plotting to assassinate former President George W. Bush. Shihab flew into the United States in 2020 and told undercover FBI agents that after overstaying his visa, he had smuggled two Hezbollah operatives across the southern border, half of the team he planned to use.
The team would arrive in the United States via international travel to Brazil and then by foot through the Darien Gap, which joins the continents at Colombia and Panama. A federal official familiar with immigration patterns told RCI that “increased migration from South America is a major factor in these increased encounters,” but stressed that is true for all crossers and that those who appear on the U.S. Terror Screening Dataset are “uncommon.”
Mr. Bensman, citing other cases of dubious crossings, said that is little solace to concerned Americans.
“So, we know of one plot,” he said.
It is what authorities call “HVEs,” or “homegrown violent extremists” who constitute the biggest threat, according to some. On Sept. 26, less than two weeks before Hamas attacked, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) argued that “homegrown threats still loom larger than the southern border.”
It was far more likely that terrorists acting in the United States would be motivated by “white supremacist” thinking or inspired by lone-wolf jihadist terrorists, such as the killer at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The CFR did not respond to questions from RCI about the situation after Oct. 7.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s home border state of Texas is ground zero in the massive influx of illegal immigration the United States has seen since President Biden’s inauguration.
“This administration is making America less safe and is making the world less safe,” Mr. Cruz said. “As the [San Diego] memo rightly notes, terrorists crossing the southern border will try to obscure their background. Because if they are coming here, there’s a very real possibility they are coming here to commit acts of terror.”
Mr. Cruz, who went to the border recently with four other senators, said on his podcast on Oct. 30 that border agents told him of a new Biden policy in the past year amounting to “guidelines for non-pursuit.” Under it, he said, agents pursuing migrants are barred from any actions “that could potentially endanger someone’s safety,” such as transporting apprehended migrants in a vehicle with not enough seatbelts for all.
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple queries about the situation on the border since Hamas’s attack, and the Lone Star State’s Department of Public Safety declined to comment.
The combination of a huge increase in the number of immigrants apprehended via the U.S. Terror Screening Dataset, the 1.7 million or more “gotaways,” and the easier ability terrorists have to enter the United States now via cartel-controlled pathways should serve as a warning to policymakers, many immigration and anti-terrorism experts believe.
“It’s beyond a real concern now,” Mr. Morgan said. “What happened in Israel should tell you two things: that global terrorism is alive and well and that there can still be massive intelligence failure. So, if you asked the intelligence community right now how many of the 1.7 million plus gotaways might be a terrorist threat, the honest answer is, ‘We don’t know.’ If you ask if there could be a sleeper cell, the honest answer would have to be, ‘We don’t know.’”
From RealClearInvestigations
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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see homan
How the border-cop-to-pundit pipeline fuels anti-immigrant coverage | Media Matters for America
How the border-cop-to-pundit pipeline fuels anti-immigrant coverage | Media Matters for America
for Tom Homan, the answer is always simple, no matter the question: Harsh punishment and brutal tactics get the job done. As a lifelong cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who has found a new career as a Fox News pundit, Homan deals in absolutes, regardless of his job title.
“Look, when it came to zero tolerance, it worked,” Homan said in a May 2020 interview, explaining and justifying the Trump administration’s family separation border policy, which he'd been advocating for since his time in the Obama administration. “Law enforcement uses zero tolerance across this country all the time, whether it’s drug enforcement or prostitution.”
:{Homan is one of three prominent border cops turned right-wing pundits who exert considerable influence in conservative media and policy circles. Along with Todd Bensman and Jaeson Jones, both former officers at the Texas Department of Public Safety, Homan pushes his hardline nativist messaging to any and all audiences that will have him. He and Bensman are both fellows at organizations founded by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”
...?
As ex-cops, Homan, Bensman, and Jones speak with a practitioner's authority. Their claimed expertise, supposedly gleaned from firsthand experience, allows them to mask xenophobia as hard-won knowledge about public safety. They provide a faux-empirical justification for anti-migrant policies, giving viewers a sense that they’re getting the unvarnished truth from people who have lived it. (In reality, border officers are frequently ignorant about basic immigration facts.) But the role these three play isn’t to inform; it’s to reinforce existing anti-immigrant prejudices and provide scaffolding for new laws and policies restricting immigration.
Tom Homan: From family separation architect to Fox News stardom
Of this cop-turned-pundit trio, Homan is the most influential. He has made at least 357 appearances on weekday Fox News since becoming a contributor in August 2018, affording him a massive platform to influence conservative thinking about immigration. Homan’s history in border enforcement — which dates back to 1984, when he became a Border Patrol agent and later joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service — is integral to the authority he commands among conservative activists, politicians, and audiences.
One Fox appearance from 2019 shows how Homan uses his sway to legitimize outlandish proposals — in this case, sending the U.S. military to Mexico to target drug cartels. In late November of that year, then-President Donald Trump floated the idea of designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, which could potentially facilitate operations into the country. Days later, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade interviewed Homan and asked about a recent mass shooting in Mexico that left 21 people dead.
“Tom, I know you say we should go help — but don’t we need to be asked?” Kilmeade said to begin the segment.
“Well, yeah. I think that would be great, and I think the Mexican president is going to ask,” Homan replied. “He has proven he can’t handle it. Mexico has failed at handling these cartels for the last three decades. They can’t succeed without us.”
Homan then approvingly referenced the U.S. invasion of Panama to oust its then-leader Manuel Noriega before arguing that Mexican drug cartels should be formally designated as terrorist organizations to empower federal law enforcement — and presumably the U.S. military — to wage war against Mexican drug cartels on their home soil.
“If we declare them [Mexican drug cartels] a terror group, what changes?” Kilmeade asked. “What does that legally let us do?”
“I think that helps the U.S. do some out-of-the-country operations to attack these organizations,” Homan responded.
If there was any confusion about where Homan stood, in its write-up of the interview, FoxNews.com characterized Homan’s remarks as “agreeing that the cartels should be designated as a terror organization by the U.S."
Homan wasn’t the only conservative pushing that idea, but he was an early adopter. Just as importantly, his years of appearances since then on Fox News have helped solidify the racist ideas used to justify the proposed terrorist group designation: that the United States is being invaded by migrants, and that those migrants are responsible for bringing a majority of the fentanyl that arrives in the country — which is factually incorrect.
Trump eventually backed off his threat to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations. But the idea of using such designations to confer authority on federal authorities to bomb or invade Mexico has essentially become a consensus position on the right. Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary, for instance, sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy, with each of them pushing for hardline restrictionist policies that are justified by dehumanizing language about immigrants “invading” the southern border.
Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy.
Homan's hawkishness has been rewarded, as the conservative media and policy ecosystem has warmly embraced him since his departure from the Trump administration. In addition to his employment at Fox News, he was named a visiting fellow at the influential Heritage Foundation in 2022. He’s also a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the nonprofit legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a branch of the Tanton network that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.
Given Homan's association with that Tanton-founded organization, it’s not surprising that he has repeatedly pushed the great replacement theory, the racist idea that liberal elites are bringing people of color to the United States to replace white people. On October 11, Homan appeared on the show of a Hitler-praising antisemite where he claimed that the Biden administration is trying to purposely destroy the country by opening the borders to bring in “millions” of “future Democratic voters.”
Homan has pursued commercial endeavors as well. In 2020, Hachette Book Group published Homan’s Defend the Border & Save Lives, complete with a front-cover blurb from his Fox News colleague Mark Levin. He is a featured speaker at JL Wilkinson Consulting, a right-wing talent agency that also represents far-right cops Sheriff David Clarke and Sheriff Mark Lamb.
Homan also founded Homeland Strategic Consulting, which pulled in over $83,000 in consulting fees for services provided to Arizona businessman and failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Money began flowing Homan’s way just four months after he publicly endorsed Lamon’s candidacy. (Homan denied that the endorsement was related to the consulting contract.)
Homan has extensive links to extremist organizations and individuals, beyond his affiliation with the Tanton network. Earlier this year, Homan spoke virtually at an event honoring Mel K, a QAnon influencer and conspiracy theorist who has spread lies about the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and denied the results of the 2020 election.
In March 2022, HuffPost reported that Homan had been scheduled to speak at an event organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. When confronted by HuffPost about his appearance at the racist conference, Homan blamed his assistant for arranging the appearance and the fact that “so many names of conservative groups sound the same."
Homan then claimed that he left the conference after reading that Fuentes was supportive of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he stopped short of criticizing the openly bigoted group. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” Homan said, referring to Fuentes and his racist supporters, known as groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know."
Later that year, HTom Trentooman co-founded an anti-immigration organization that bears the same name as Homan’s book, Defend the Border & Save Lives, with fellow Islamophobe . In addition to helping Homan pilot the new group, Trento, who once told an audience at a 9/11 commemoration in 2013 that the goal of “all Islam” is to “get every single one of us to convert to Islam,” also runs an organization called The United West, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-Muslim group.
This March, Homan was named CEO of election denialist organization The America Project, founded by far-right multimillionaire Patrick Byrne. In addition to his duties as CEO, Homan also heads the group’s Border911 initiative, which has sponsored anti-migrant events throughout the country. The organization frequently posts videos of its rallies on Rumble, an extreme right-wing YouTube clone. Newsmax’s Jaeson Jones is also part of Border911, and he spoke alongside Homan at many of the group’s recent events.
Homan frequently denies that he has any political agenda, instead couching his preferences simply as apolitical enforcement of existing laws enacted by Congress. In 2018, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Homan if ICE’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, a policy Homan was overseeing at the time, was “humane."
“I think it’s the law,” Homan replied.
“It may be the law, it may be the policy, but is it humane?” Blitzer asked again.
“I think it’s the law, and I’m a law enforcement [officer],” Homan reiterated. “I must follow the law.”
But for Homan, not all laws are meant to be followed. In April, he headlined a Border911 fundraiser with Donald Trump at the former president’s residence and club Mar-a-Lago to raise money for families of people who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Speaking to the crowd, Homan reminisced about an early conversation in which Trump told him to “enforce the laws, that's all I'm asking you to do.”
“We kicked ass,” Homan reflected. “We kicked ass.”
Todd Bensman: Not an expert on immigration, by his own admission
Like Homan, Bensman has leveraged his history in law enforcement into a new career as an immigration restrictionist pundit and writer. Most of his work appears on the website for the Center for Immigration Studies — another branch of the anti-immigrant Tanton network — but he’s also written two books, and has published pieces at The Daily Wire, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and other prominent conservative news outlets. He’s been on Fox News and Fox Business combined at least 27 times since 2017, according to a search of an internal Media Matters database and Bensman’s official website.
As Media Matters previously reported, Bensman has also appeared on extremist streaming programs as well. In June, he appeared on The Stew Peters Show, whose eponymous host is a white nationalist. He’s also been on at least three programs or platforms with ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, including: The Mel K Show, Making Sense of the Madness (hosted by QAnon supporter Sean Morgan), and The Debbie Aldrich Show, from Creative Destruction Media, an outfit that in addition to endorsing QAnon also posts racist and anti-LGBTQ content.
In 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies brought Bensman on as a senior national security fellow. From his first days at the organization, Bensman stoked fears about terrorist “infiltration” at the southern border, a framing he regularly returns to despite evidence that conservatives wildly overstate the perceived threat as a way to demonize migrants.
In mid-September, Bensman spoke at a conference that also hosted John Eidsmoe, a retired Air Force officer who once spoke at a conference organized by a white supremacist group and has praised Confederate leader Jefferson Davis and pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun. QAnon-promoter Alex Newman was also a featured speaker at the event.
A granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.
Bensman frequently adopts a flood-the-zone style of content production, using his Center for Immigration Studies-sponsored trips to the border to create images and videos that confirm the bigoted prior assumptions of his intended audience. One of his recent successful operations was seeding a myth that the Biden administration was providing all migrant families with $2,200 monthly cost-of-living checks. Experts fact-checked the claim as false in real time, and news organizations have long debunked earlier versions of the persistent rumor,but a granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.
On September 6, Bensman posted a video on X purportedly showing a Border Patrol agent saying migrant families “get a check every month” of “about $2,200.” Bensman characterized the imaginary program as a “scam,” but acknowledged that he would have “to independently confirm” its existence, which he did not do. Instead, Bensman repeated the false claim three days later, even while admitting the accusation was “short of details” and “unverified.”
In the meantime, the conspiracy theory-amplifying pipeline kicked into overdrive. The same day he first posted on X about the supposed checks, Bensman went on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and continued to spread the myth.
Video
CitationFrom the September 6, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
“The government gives them cost-of-living checks, for one family per month: $2,200. So if the father brings one of the kids and the mother brings another of the kids, and they just act like two families, they’re pulling in $4,400 a month, according to that Border Patrol agent,” Bensman told Bannon. Bensman again acknowledged he hadn’t confirmed whether it was true or not, but that didn’t stop him from spending more than two minutes spreading the misinformation.
ESCALATOR:]
On September 7, junk news site The Gateway Pundit picked up the story, citing Bensman as its primary source.
The same day, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy parroted Bensman’s conspiracy theory, telling Fox’s audience that the Biden administration was “paying $2,200 per family."
Republican politicians spread the myth even further. “We are literally subsidizing our own invasion,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said on X, reposting The Gateway Pundit’s story. Former Trump official and Christian nationalist Russ Vought, a well-connected policy adviser on Capitol Hill, then reposted Gaetz.
Rep. Lauren Boebert repeated the $2,200-per-month claim on X/Twitter without any sourcing. When asked by local 9News Denver where she got her information, Boebert’s press office sent a link to the Gateway Pundit story. (9News’s ruling on Boebert’s statement? “Not true.”)
On September 10, Bensman obliquely walked back his initial claim, without clearly admitting he was wrong. He later defended himself to The Washington Post, saying: “I was hoping to get to the bottom of it. Maybe an expert would send a link or explain it.”
At least one element of Bensman’s story is true. As he inadvertently acknowledged, he is not an expert. He is a propagandist, and his distortions are all the more potent in right-wing media because of his history as a cop.
Jaeson Jones: Bringing the war on terror to Mexico
On May 19, Newsmax border correspondent Jaeson Jones posted a promotional video for The America Project and Border911 to his Instagram account. In the video, Jones, sitting alongside Homan, directly addresses Border Patrol agents.
“I’m Jaeson Jones, retired captain from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and someone who’s out there on the border every day working with you guys to try to get out what you’re going through to the American people,” Jones said.
No viewer would expect Newsmax, which has sought to outflank Fox News from the right, to adhere to journalistic standards of neutrality and balance, but it’s still remarkable that Jones would openly admit that his goal as a correspondent is to show what his fellow border cops are “going through” rather than gather facts. By his own admission, he’s not covering a story — he’s “working with” the Texas Department of Public Safety and Border Patrol agents.
When Jones, Homan, and Bensman speak, they are speaking on behalf of border cops and law enforcement writ large, acting as representatives of what journalist Jessica Pishko describes as a “baronial class” of public employees who enjoy special rights and privileges. These ex-cops are pushing the ideological and material interests of that class, with the end result of expanding law enforcement budgets and political influence. The explosion of federal spending on immigration and border enforcement stretches back for decades, but the fearmongering that Homan, Bensman, and Jones push has the predictable effect of directing ever more public funds to this repressive apparatus.
That dynamic explains, in part, why — like Homan — Jones has repeatedly called for the U.S. government to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Such a move would almost certainly open up vast resources for state and federal border officers, in addition to conferring more political power and legal authority on those departments.
In fact, Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.
Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.
During a June 18, 2019, interview with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business, Jones described cartels as “global violent networks who are acting as terrorist organizations around the world.” He added that several cartels had “gone through a quantum leap in capabilities,” in part because of “what they’ve learned from the FARC, which is a designated terrorist organization."
Jones was referring to the Colombian guerilla group that the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization from 1997 to 2021, and the reference wasn’t incidental. In the early days of the war on terror, the group served a crucial role for another federal organization, the Drug Enforcement Agency.
As journalist Trevor Aaronson has described, in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government began funneling money into any project that could be described as counterterrorism. With Washington focused on global terrorism, the DEA, a key combatant in the previous generation’s war on drugs, found itself sidelined and relatively starved of federal funds. To bolster its raison d'être, the agency invented a new category of crime — narcoterrorism — and used the FARC, a designated terrorist organization funded in part by drug trafficking, as a pry-bar to access all the counterterrorism money sloshing around Washington at the time.
Under the DEA’s new mission, agents and their informants pretended to be members of the FARC and engaged in elaborate sting operations targeting purported terrorists. Given the FARC’s designation as a terror group, the DEA could claim that it stopped a would-be terrorist if its undercover agents convinced FARC rebels to act on their behalf. (Nevermind that they would have manufactured those would-be terrorists.) With federal resources on the line, fighting terrorism was as much a bureaucratic turf war as it was about waging any other kind of war.
As a former counterterrorism official at Texas Department of Public Safety, Jones likely would have known that specific history. More broadly, he surely understood how the federal funding game is played, and he kept pushing the new line. In a July 2019 interview, also on Lou Dobbs Tonight, Jones was even more explicit in calling for cartels to be labeled terror groups, and again referenced the FARC.
“These are terrorist organizations that are no longer just drug trafficking organizations,” Jones said. “They have evolved into something much larger."
“The U.S. government has not transitioned yet to look at them as terrorists and to designate them as terrorists but yet, they employ the FARC — that is a designated terrorist organization,” he added.
Jones repeated his calls that August, September, October, and November — when Trump publicly contemplated moving forward — and then again the following December, February, March, and June, all on Lou Dobbs Tonight. In the September segment, Jones told Dobbs he had lobbied four members of Congress, “trying to get this foreign terrorist designation.” In 2021, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to push for the change, and he continues to agitate for it from his new perch at Newsmax.
The once-fringe idea is now largely accepted as conventional wisdom on the right. Jones and Homan played a significant role in normalizing it, specifically by appealing to their identities as former cops. If their pitch is successful under the next Republican administration, their former agencies would almost certainly benefit handsomely from their advocacy.
The porous border between the hard-right and mainstream media
Homan, Bensman, and Jones are not the only former cops in the right-wing media and think tank ecosystem. One of Bensman’s colleagues at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jon Feere, is a former ICE and DHS official whom NPR quoted in June. Randy Clark, a writer at Breitbart, is retired from Border Patrol. Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protections, is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and is a member of Homan's Border911. The list goes on. These figures agitate for nativist immigration policies, channeling reactionary law enforcement attitudes into content served up in conservative media. The answer for them is always zero tolerance, harsher punishments, and more funding and discretion for cops.
The cop-turned-pundit pipeline isn’t unique to conservative outlets, but these figures loom especially large in their reactionary ecosystem given the centrality of nativist politics in the age of Trump. The programs where they appear, especially on Fox News, often set the tone for how mainstream outlets frame immigration, as mainstream outlets frequently adopt language that there is a “crisis” at the border.
One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage. In mid-September, Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria called for the president to “use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending."
To support this extreme and seemingly illegal position, Zakaria cited Nolan Rappaport, a former Department of Homeland Security official who now writes xenophobic op-eds at The Hill. Zakaria identified Rappaport only as “a longtime congressional expert on the issue,” but there’s much more to the story.
One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage.
Rappaport, as it turns out, appears to be profoundly influenced by the organizations that employ Homan and Bensman. Rappaport blurbed Bensman’s first book, has cited him in at least three recent op-eds, and cited the Center for Immigration Studies in another. Rappaport frequently directs his stories, which he posts on X, at the Center for Immigration Studies’ policy director by tagging her username and at the account for Immigration Reform Law Institute, where Homan is a legal fellow. The Immigration Reform Law Institute then regularly reposts Rappaport’s stories to its own feed.
The pipeline from the Center for Immigration Studies and Bensman, and the Immigration Reform Law Institute and Homan, to Rappaport to Zakaria is invisible to the average reader. But Homan, for his part, sees it clearly.
“Please support CIS,” Homan said at the end of the conversation where he defended zero tolerance punishment against sex workers, people who use drugs, and families who crossed the southern border. He was speaking with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “When I was the director of ICE, even when I was running ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations, number three in ICE — CIS was a great help to the rule of law and helping ICE do their job."
“And they’re on the right side of the argument, folks, and we’re in a fight for our — we’re in a fight for our lives right now,” he continued. “We’re in a fight for this country. CIS gets it. They’re on the right side of the issues and they’re helping shape immigration in the future. So please support them.”
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kinda wonky?
off bs
https://cis.org/
7 23
Center Staff
Mark Krikorian, Executive Director
Andrew R. Arthur, Resident Fellow in Law and Policy
Julie Axelrod, Director of Litigation
Todd Bensman, Senior National SecurityFellow
Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research
Jon Feere, Director of Investigations
George Fishman, Senior Legal Fellow
Jamie Greedan, Assistant Director of Development
Bryan Griffith, Multimedia Director
Elizabeth Jacobs, Director of Regulatory Affairs and Policy
Patrick McHugh, Editor
Bill Ostrye, Director of Administration
Jason Richwine, Resident Scholar
Nayla Rush, Senior Researcher
Marguerite Telford, Director of Communications
Alison Thai, Communications Associate
Jessica M. Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies
John Wahala, Assistant Director
Karen Zeigler, Demographer
Center Fellows
Lesley Blackner, Legal Fellow
JerryKammer, Senior Research Fellow
Daniel Pipes, Senior Fellow
Board of Directors
Peter Nunez, Chairman
Founding Board Members
Otis L. Graham Jr., Founding Chairman
:{
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bombadier post hill
:{:{Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History}:
By Todd Bensman
Publication Date: February 21, 2023
Publisher: Bombardier Books
ISBN: 1637585705}:
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“Someone needed to finally document how the administration of Joe Biden threw away the most secure border in modern history and left America increasingly open and vulnerable to a vast and complex set of threats from outside its borders. The U.S. media has abdicated its solemn duty to acknowledge, let alone report, the devastating truth behind the worst border crisis in our lifetime. But thankfully, Todd Bensman finally brings people right into the heart of what happened and is still happening. I know Bensman’s border reporting. The nation needs to know it too so that the next generation of elected leaders has a roadmap to end the destruction.” – Mark Morgan, Acting Commissioner of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, July 2019-January 20, 2021.
“When we look back at this time during the history of immigration in America, Todd’s work reporting, researching, observing, and chronicling what is actually happening on America’s southern border will go down as the gold standard. While others work on hyperbole and political opinion, Todd is reporting what is taking place at major border crossings, why the border is experiencing border swells, and how immigration patterns change based on U.S. policy. Everyone interested in border security should read his book.” — Kristina Tanasichuk, Executive Editor, Homeland Security Today
“The U.S.-Mexico border is an opaque landscape populated with human traffickers, international terror suspects, migrant children and American law enforcement agents. No one truly understands how it all intersects: from the marbled corridors of power to the arid smuggling routes of the desert. Bensman is as close as it gets. With boots on the ground, Bensman paints a portrait that is as thrilling as it is outrageous. Written with a sharp pen, this is a must-read for anyone trying to understand one of the most important issues of our time.” — Pulitzer Prize winning former New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff, host of the No BS News Hour podcast
“I have been involved in immigration enforcement and border security since 1984 and have closely followed Todd Bensman’s work… He tells the truth about illegal immigration and how it is not a victimless crime. With immigration issues being front and center for the American people now, his book is an absolute Must Read.” — Thomas Homan, former Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement January 2017-August 2018
“Todd Bensman is one of the only journalists in America who has been willing to spend significant time on both sides of the border, chronicle and analyze events with an unflinching eye, and tell the truth about what’s happening. His reportage on the historic and ongoing border crisis is essential right now not just because so few media outlets will cover it, but because if the American people aren’t told the truth, we won’t be able to stop it.” — John Daniel Davidson, senior editor, The Federalist
“Todd Bensman presents the astonishing story of how the administration of President Joe Biden has allowed pragmatic policy to be canceled by ideological forces of the open-borders left that now dominate the Democratic Party. Bensman takes his readers into the world of the migrants who are being drawn — hundreds of thousands every month — to the southern border of the U.S. by what some glowingly call Biden’s “invitation.” His book is a public service for every American who wants border policies that are based in an understanding of the difference between generosity and recklessness, between reasonable limits and chaos in the name of boundless compassion.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jerry Kammer, author of the the book Losing Control, How a Left-Right Coalition Blocked Immigration Reform and Provoked the Backlash that Elected Trump
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Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children
Jessica Vaughan testified before the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement within the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, April 26.
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ctr immigr studies
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/12/anti-immigrant-groups-mainstream-media
John Tanton, who died in July, spent the last four decades of his life building an anti-immigrant movement rooted in white nationalism. An ophthalmologist by training, his interest in immigration was spurred by his concern over population growth — there were too many people competing for too few resources. The solution, in Tanton’s mind, was to restrict immigration by overturning the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, a law that eliminated the racist quota system that had virtually excluded everyone who wasn’t a white European from immigrating to the U.S.
In 1979, Tanton launched the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. He also founded the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. The “big three,” as the groups are collectively known, went on to become the intellectual backbone of the nativist movement in the United States.
Tanton’s groups argued that unchecked immigration brought with it unemployment, high crime rates, and other social ills. Their ideas were, for many years, infrequently cited in the mainstream media, where they were considered on the fringe of the immigration debate. Though they are still not widely cited, there has been a noticeable increase in references to these groups since Trump’s rise to political power.
Image: Courtesy of Define American
“John Tanton walked in, eyes wide open, and embraced white nationalism as a motivating factor, injecting it into our immigration policy,” said Ahmad. In a bid to make more information about this controversial figure available, Ahmad set out in 2016 to win the release of Tanton’s files, which were to be released by the University of Michigan in 2035. A Michigan appellate court ruling in Ahmad’s favor in June, but the university is in the process of appealing the decision.
Ahmad said Tanton’s long view and network of groups allowed his message to spread far and wide. “It might have ended with him, but he was so influential in creating this entire framework,” he said. “He wasn’t thinking about policies for the next five years or 10 years; he was thinking 100 years. Fear of an ‘invasion,’ ‘Latin onslaught,’ ‘America being less white,’ appealed to — and is in a sick, symbiotic relationship with — bona fide white nationalists.”
The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda runs parallel to the agendas of the Tanton-linked groups. In 2016, Trump cited a study by the Center of Immigration Studies in a
that fearmongered about immigrants, accusing them of “collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line.”
That influence has moved into the halls of power with Trump. A number of individuals formerly employed by groups in the Tanton network now work on immigration at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Julie Kirchner, who was the executive director of FAIR from 2007 to 2015, is the ombudsperson of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at DHS. Robert Law, who was the government relations director at FAIR from 2013 to 2017, has been a senior policy adviser at USCIS since October 2017. Elizabeth Jacobs, another senior adviser at USCIS, was also a lobbyist for FAIR, where she advocated for ending Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans and reducing refugee admissions. Jon Feere, who was a legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, joined U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2017 as a policy adviser.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, has leveraged the revolving door between the Tanton organizations to try to get easy access to information. “Do you know if an actual person I can call at E-Verify for statistics (or maybe in your shop)?” Krikorian wrote to Law, the USCIS adviser, in December 2017, according to a record obtained by American Oversight through a public records request. “I’m trying to go through public affairs, but that may take a while and there’s some problems with the numbers at the E-Verify site, and a PR person isn’t going to know what I’m talking about.”
With the ascent of a fellow traveler into the White House and, with him, a gaggle of former employees from Tanton-linked groups into key policymaking positions, the groups have increasingly been cited as sources in mainstream immigration coverage. These citations are almost always in neutral terms that do not provide context about the groups’ agendas.
Once the researchers working on the Define American report identified instances in which the Center for Immigration Studies, FAIR, and NumbersUSA were cited, two coders manually studied the data to determine whether any context was provided, according to Ethan Zuckerman, a report author and the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media.
“They looked at each of the mentions, and they looked to see if things were mentioned in any critical terms,” Zuckerman explained. “The theory behind that is that this group of think tanks is a pretty heavily agendaed group of organizations — groups that have been really sort of leading the anti-immigrant movement — and there’s a great deal of a relationship between them. And they’re far from a neutral provider of research and data. So, what we were looking for in that was, was there a caveat that says, you know, ‘This center, which has a track record of advocating against immigration’ or ‘This center, which takes a strong stand against immigration’?” Zuckerman added, “When we’re saying that we don’t find that, that means they’re simply just being cited as a source.”
Mainstreaming Hatemongers’ Words
The Washington Post consistently used what the Define American researchers considered denigrating language more frequently than the other outlets; along with the New York Times, it had a higher percentage of stories with degrading terms as compared to a sample collection of 227 national news sources, as well as collections of news sources that lean left or center-left. Right and center-right sources consistently used denigrating language more frequently than other news outlets.
Despite a 56 percent increase in the use of denigrating terms in the pages of the Los Angeles Times over the four-year period, it had the lowest overall percentage of stories that included such language — even though it had the highest overall increase in immigration coverage.
Zuckerman said the Los Angeles Times stands out as a newsroom that appears to have made a deliberate decision to avoid normalizing language that dehumanizes immigrants.
“We see evidence from our study of the LA Times that they handled it differently,” Zuckerman said. “They’ve been very reluctant to use that denigrating language, and in fact, even after it ticked up for a bit, they’ve brought it back. What that indicates to me is that they’ve made some very conscious newsroom choices that they don’t want to normalize this language, even by putting it in quotes.” He added, “We find that really interesting because that creates clearly an alternative way to handle this language.”
The Los Angeles Times’s style guide allows for the use of “illegal immigration” to describe entry or residence into a country in violation of the law, but it encourages writers to avoid “illegal immigrant” or “undocumented immigrant,” unless it appears in a direct quote. “We know that migration and immigrant communities are essential parts of day-to-day life in Los Angeles and across our region, and we have worked diligently to expand our coverage in recent years,” the paper’s managing editor, Scott Kraft, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Our language and style guidelines for immigration-related topics are fairly strict. They’re based on the expertise of our staff and are intended to help reflect our diverse city.”
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the New York Times shared the paper’s stylebook entry for “immigration status,” which notes that “the language of the immigration debate is often politically charged” and cautions reporters to “be as specific as possible in describing immigration situations.”
Illegal immigrant remains accurate and acceptable, but be aware that some people view it as loaded or offensive. (Illegal immigration, because it describes the issue rather than an individual, is less likely to be seen as troubling.) Undocumented, the term preferred by many immigrants and their advocates, is also acceptable, though using that term exclusively may be seen as one-sided. Unauthorized is also accurate and may be perceived as more neutral than other descriptions.
Consider other alternatives whenever possible to explain the specific circumstances of the person in question, or to focus on actions: who crossed the border illegally; who overstayed a visa; who is not authorized to work in the United States.
Take particular care in describing people whose immigration status is complex or subject to change — for example, young people brought to this country as children, many of whom received temporary reprieves from deportation under federal policies adopted in 2012. The common colloquial term Dreamers may be used sparingly for this group, but avoid making it the routine description, which may seem tendentious.
Do not use illegal as a noun, and avoid the sinister-sounding alien.
USA Today did not respond to a request for comment. The Washington Post did not provide a comment in time for publication.
The Define American report authors posit that U.S. newsrooms face a distinct challenge when reporting on immigration in the age of Trump. “Do they adopt terms used by public figures and use them throughout their coverage?” the report asks. “Do they acknowledge denigrating terminology but parrot the language, separating themselves by using quotation marks to make clear they do not endorse the framing? Or do they resist denigrating language by simply avoiding it, choosing instead to omit or rephrase?”
At present, news outlets are often choosing the middle path. The Define American researchers suggest that journalists think more deliberately about the language of immigration reporting. They offer five basic ethical standards of reporting, including focusing on the people most impacted by policy prescriptions, setting high standards for when it’s necessary to quote newsmakers using denigrating terms, not quoting nativist groups without context about their history and ties to the government, continuing to work toward diversifying newsrooms, and establishing these standards in public style guides.
“This study creates an important opportunity for self-reflection by major news organizations in deciding whether to purge denigrating phraseology in their style guidelines,” Peter Perl, the former assistant managing editor of the Washington Post who oversaw the newspaper’s guidelines, said in a written statement. The use of big data gives journalists “an unprecedented insight into the impact of their language choices and their selection of information sources,” added Perl, who sits on the board of Define American. “We hope they will use this chance to provide a fairer, more balanced presentation of the U.S. immigration debate to better serve their millions of readers worldwide.”
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