Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, supports a bill sponsored by U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14), which would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to report how many special interest aliens are illegally crossing the border each month and their countries of origin.
A special interest alien, according to DHS, is “a non-U.S. person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests.”
Greene’s bill, filed as H.R.275, is called the Special Interest Alien Reporting Act.
While Bensman said the measure could use some improvements, such as requiring further information about special interest aliens to be reported by DHS each month, he said he believes H.R.275 is “a worthy bill” to pass on transparency grounds.
“It’s a good bill. It’s the first bill of its kind that I’ve ever seen in all the years that I’ve been studying special interest aliens…It’s important because really anything at all that we do with special interest aliens is like a big state secret, and the fact that it was a big state secret allowed the Biden administration to shut the whole thing down,” Bensman explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“It’s time to take the veil down and put those numbers up…It brings awareness – are we providing security screening to that number of people? It would give the media a reason to report on the latest numbers, if they’re up, if they’re down, etc.,” Bensman added.
Bensman further explained that special interest aliens who cross into the U.S. have routinely gone through secondary screening for over two decades following the September 11, 2001 terror attack; however, such procedures came to a halt under the previous administration due to the unprecedented influx of illegal crossings at the border.
Noting how the Trump administration has implemented policies at the border to end the Biden-created crisis of unprecedented illegal crossings, Bensman said Greene’s bill would work to prevent future administrations from hiding such data about special interest aliens from the public which, as seen under the previous administration, allowed the collapse of the crucial vetting process.
“It’s a protocol that we’ve had in place for 20 years to help us vet whether we’ve got terrorists crossing…Normally, we have 3,000 or 4,000 a year and we can do some security screening and vetting face-to-face interviews on most of those, but under Biden, the numbers were far too vast for us to do really any screening whatsoever, very few if any interviews face-to-face with them. They were just moving through. There were just too many of them, so the whole system collapsed,” Bensman said.
“This is a natural bipartisan program, so nobody should be against [Greene’s bill],” Bensman added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
