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Unknown A
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Unknown A
Todd, welcome to the program. Todd is the premier expert on the southern border invasion. Todd, in the last month of Biden's regime, how many people on average were crossing the southern border? And now what have we seen over the last 30 days?
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Unknown B
Right. We've seen the numbers drop from the last month Biden administration by two thirds just through January and now it's down by another 2/3 to for February, 8,326 illegal crossings, that of apprehensions. All of those people have been detained and expelled or are being expelled right now, none of them are being released. That number, according to Mike Banks, the new chief of Border Patrol, is the lowest number in U.S. recorded history. Just to give you an idea, 8,000 may sound like a lot to the uninitiated, but in December of 2023, which was the height of the whole thing, if you include the parolees that they were letting fly in and crossing over the the land ports, plus illegal immigrants, it was close to 400,000. So that's the night and day. I mean that's a kind of a norm, an Unbelievable norm, 8,000 a day. I hope that they can maintain that.
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Unknown B
If they do, we'll have the lowest year of illegal immigration on record.
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Unknown A
So I just want to repeat that. So how many people a day on average under Biden? It was almost sometimes 5 to 10,000 a day, is that correct?
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Unknown B
That's right. The typical day was 7 to 8,000 a day, but that ranged up to 14,000 a day. Very often we had 9, 10, 12,000 a day. It was just an absolute torrent of humanity. And the reason is simply. I know you know this, but we were releasing most of them into the interior, and once word of that spreads, they're willing to lay down their smuggling fee money and gamble that they're going to get into all that was ever necessary here. We didn't need some big Senate bill. Senate bill. The Langford Senate bill.
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Unknown A
Remember the campaign, what fraud that guy is? Could we just like Senator Langford? That guy needs to be removed from office. Senator Langford is a complete fraud. Please continue.
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Unknown B
Oh, root causes. We have to fix the root causes of immigration, and we've got to do a Marshall Plan in Central America. We have to have comprehensive immigration reform. That's gonna take years and complex bipartisan deals and all that kind of stuff. No, all that was ever needed was a push of a button, which is follow the law as it exists. Detention, expulsion, deportation proceedings. No catch and release. That's all that was ever needed. It took all of one hour on Inauguration Day to close the southern border or to get it as close to operationally secure as I think we can ever really hope to get it. The operational secure border is zero. So if you just have two or 300 a day coming in, I mean, we just. That's pretty good. Take it. That's a win. The issue there is that we let America think that there was some big, complicated thing going on that we had.
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Unknown B
We're just victims. We have to just curl up in a fetal position and take the beating, because that's just the way the world is. It never was that. It never was that. All that was ever needed was detention, deportation, expulsion, no catch and release, period. End of story. It's over. Now, having said that, and probably at the cost of my book sales, whatever it is the truth that we're not. We can't let off the gas because you trump the policies that he's put in place. Those policies which are in line with the law, the law requires those things have to be maintained rigorously. You can't make exceptions. It has to be evenly applied. Border length or the duration, or they will reverse. It will come back. But right now, you're seeing reverse migration. You're seeing in the Darien Gap, which I visited in August, there are thousands of people all around me moving toward, moving north in the transition period when Biden was still in office.
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Unknown B
They're reversing. They're going back the other way. Thousands moving from Mexico back through Panama and then back around to Colombia and going home to supposedly very dangerous countries that we had to give them refuge from, sanctuary and asylum from. They're returning to those countries in large numbers. So this is really extraordinary. I wanna say one other thing that we're not done. The Trump administration is just at the beginning. They have to hermetically close that border. They got toa stop the bleeding first. Then they've got a big cleanup in the interior. We have 10, 12 million. Nobody really knows how many came in over the last four years. And that's where the Trump administration is gearing up an infrastructure right now. And then there's the cartels. That's part of the policy. And fentanyl trafficking. So the whole three part program isn't over yet. It's just that the first part, the most important part maybe is that the blood is stopped.
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Unknown A
So TD, I just want to repeat those numbers. 277 a day and all of which are being returned to their country of origin. They're not being released into the interior. One thing that is striking to me before we dive more into the cleanup, is that how prepared President Trump's team was for that. You say that it's the lowest ever recorded, but that means that President Trump is even beating his records from the first Trump term. What did the Trump team learn, especially during those four years off? So that day one, they were so prepared where in the first term they were still figuring this out.
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Unknown B
Right. This is definitely lower than even the first term. The big change was to bring the Mexican military on board. They use that 25% trade tariff cudgel sledgehammer. If you don't put out down there in Mexico, we're going to put your economy in recession inside of a month or two with these trade tariffs. So they put out 10,000 troops that are turning anybody that they catch back down into southern Mexico and even doing their own deportations from southern Mexico to home countries. The Trump administration did that in the first in 1.0, but they did it much later in the administration. Now they did it first in using the cudgel of a trade sanction. So that was huge. And the other thing is that we're using something called 212F, which is an instant expulsion authority that's clearly spelled out in current law, the INA 212F. Go Google it, look it up.
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Unknown B
There's been some litigation with it, but it allows the President to instantly expel all comers without providing asylum. Now, they expected there'be some litigation, so they put in behind it, remain in Mexico, which also allows quick expulsions. You can claim asylum, but you have to wait in Mexico. You don't get released. That's a huge. That's the big thing that has been vetted all the way to the supreme court from Trump 1.0. So that's ready to go to as a. They've got multi layered architecture in there. They put far more military personnel down there for spotting to be able to fill gaps and to hold to be in places where Border patrol isn't. And that's making an impact. But another big impact is the fact that since they're not releasing everybody that comes to the border, they don't need border patrol to process them in. So they're out there catching illegal immigrants and detaining them instead of doing babysitting and, you know, providing baby formula and food and water while they process people into the interior.
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Unknown B
Everything's different than the first time. They definitely learned a lot from 1.0 on how to shut that border down.
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Unknown A
So, Todd, how many illegals are in the interior of our country and how do we remove them?
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Unknown B
Well, the center for Immigration Studies estimates that they're somewhere on the order of about 12 million that came in under this particular historic crisis. So those are recent arrivals. Most of them or many of them are on public welfare systems. And some of them are in sort of like a quasi legal state of applying for different kinds of benefits. So there's gonna be. We can't just swoop in and get everybody, but there are undoubtedly many millions that are completely illegal. There's at least half a million or 650,000 criminal aliens that are immediately deportable if we can lay hands on them. 1.4 million who are under final judicial orders to be removed, but that the last administration refused to ever remove anybody. And then you've got everybody else that haven't been. They haven't gotten any trouble yet. They haven't been through all the appeals. There are people who are here on parole programs, so all different categories.
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Unknown B
Plenty of work to do. To be able to look at it this way, it's like a Category 9 hurricane just raked the country for four years back and forth. And now you've got this mammoth cleanup to do. And it's not gonna be easy, it's gonna be expensive, and it's gonna take phases to do the mass deportations. And one of the key problems challenges is that the Biden administration systematically dismantled the detention deportation machine. And there's parts laying all over, you know, the garage, basically. So you have Tom Homman. Everybody's got toa come in and rebuild that infrastructure, to rebuild that machine and get it tuned up. So chill out. It's gonna happen. It's just gonna take a little bit of time. But they've moved out 50,000 criminal aliens already in a month or month and a half. That's 50,000 of the worst, first worst, they said, and many more are like that are coming, but eventually they will expand out as they get more detention space, more officers, more of everything.
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Unknown B
There's $175 billion request in the budget, current budget package for this kind of work. We will need to see that if they want to get the infrastructure back to where it was before Biden wrecked it.
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Unknown A
Well, explain to the audience, or especially to me, the tension between states that declare themselves sanctuary states like California and federal immigration law. Has that been settled?
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Unknown B
It's being settled. The problem is that we call it sanctuary policy. These are sanctuary cities. I don't really like that term. The term sort of papers over. What it's really at root about. At root, what sanctuary policy is about is that local police chiefs, sheriffs, prison officials won't simply call ice, pick up the phone and call ICE and let them know when a criminal alien is about to be released so that ICE could be right there to pick them up and they don't enjoy one moment of freedom. And then we deport them. They won't do that simple thing. Well, that is mostly the category of immigrants that you're talking about. There are criminals. Why, any mayor or police chief or sheriff anywhere in the world would be down with that. To inflict those kinds of illegal aliens on their own people, I'll never understand as long as I live, but they're doing that.
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Unknown B
That makes ICE officers have to go track them down at their homes or in their workplaces or whatever. And it's an office or safety issue. It's not easy to catch them. You're gonna find all kinds of other illegal aliens around them that aren't criminals, that have to be swept up as well. It's not efficient and it's not safe. And I think what the Trump administration is endeavoring to do is to withdraw federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions until they play ball. And why wouldn't you want to play ball on something like that? Why wouldn't you?
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Unknown A
So, Todd, your next book is going to be called Once Overrun, Now Liberated. That should be the new title. Thank you, Todd. Excellent work. Come back anytime. Thank you.
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Unknown B
Thank you.