Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the greatest mass migration border crisis in U.S. history ended in a matter of hours under President Donald Trump’s executive powers implementing simple “deportation, detention, and expulsion” policies for illegal migrants.
One month into Trump’s presidency, illegal border crossings were found to be down 94 percent over last year while interior arrests were up 137 percent.
Bensman said Trump’s executive actions have delivered the “lowest border crossings in American history ever recorded,” marking the end of “historic volumes” of illegal crossings that began on the day former President Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021.
“We had the most historic volumes of human beings crossing ever recorded and that began on Inauguration Day of January 2021 – Biden’s Inauguration day. We can see from the data that’s when it began…It ended, in my opinion, on January 20th, 2025 because we saw these policies put in place that immediately led to a tightly correlated drop in illegal crossings,” Bensman explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“In the first full month of the Trump administration, we can see that we have hit the lowest border crossings in American history ever recorded because of the particular policies that are in place and some other circumstances,” Bensman added.
Bensman said he believes the policies implemented under Trump will continue holding illegal border crossings at record lows for the president’s full term.
“I believe that’s going to hold for at least the next four years . We’re not going to see zero people crossing. That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not a border crisis, that’s just the norm. What I’m talking about are the huge volumes that we all saw that went on for years of millions of people of hundreds of thousands a month. That, I believe, is over,” Bensman said.
When it comes to the execution of Trump’s border policies, Bensman said the implementation of such orders took “about an hour,” proving that the previous administration’s claims that the migration crisis needed “comprehensive reform” and that Congress needed to pass legislation to secure the border was all a “complete bogus lie.”
“All of these ideas about what it would take to close the border – that we needed a Senate bill…the root causes doctrine, which was the Biden administration’s central theory of border security, that we have to do a Marshall plan in Central America to rebuild those countries so that nobody wants to leave them – all of those things are now buried in the dung heap of completely debunked disgraced theories and ideas that never should be allowed to rise again,” Bensman said.
“Never should anybody listen to a theory that sounds like we have to rebuild other countries to stop this sort of thing. No. We never needed comprehensive immigration reform. The border was never broken. The system was never broken. All of those things were just a complete bogus lie. They stand exposed and disgraced permanently. That must be banished from the American conversation forevermore about the border because now it’s exposed what really shut the border down, which was just simply deportation, detention, expulsion, and a halt to mass releases of people into the interior. That’s, that was always all that it ever was. Just that simple a thing. Trump came in and pushed the button. And it was over,” Bensman added.
Bensman went on to note that the Biden administration simply “didn’t want to” end the border crisis.
“Biden could have done any of those things at any time. They didn’t want to. They purposefully engineered this thing in a way that propped the floodgates open,” Bensman said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
