From American taxpayers this is according to Todd Benjamin and his extensive reporting throughout Latin America Benjamin is a senior National Security fellow with the center for immigration studies and an award-winning journalist covering National Security topics with a focus on the Texas border he’s also the author of the new book
Titled overrun how Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in U.S history hey Todd Benjamin thanks for being back on Crossroads great to be here oh Todd you know you did a new book on the U.S Mexico border crisis overrun and uh great work on it
By the way you talk about something that uh you talk about something actually I’ve been talking about too but you give a lot more detail on it which is that the United Nations is paying illegal aliens to come to the United States tell us about this I mean how is the
United Nations paying people to come here well it is true that the United Nations is a very Hands-On involved on the migrant Trails all the way down into South America uh straight up to the Texas border all along the Texas border uh in in a number of ways and in the the
Most visible way is that they are showering the immigrants the U.S bound immigrants with cash in the form of debit cards uh and you can ask them the immigrants to show you their debit cards their U.N cards uh they have uh they’ll pull them right out for you it’s um you
Know they get monthly stipends that are put on there every month every two weeks how much money roughly it it depends it’s it’s pegged to local cost of living so if they’re up near the Texas border uh I found cards up there that that were getting close to 400
Every two weeks wow so eight hundred dollars a month and in southern Mexico like in tapachula uh down there on the Guatemala border it’s a little cheaper to live and so it’s like you know more like a couple thousand pesos uh just a month or so ago I was in uh Monterey
Mexico and found uh you know the debit cards there and they were you know you know 2 800 pesos a month which is like 100 120 bucks or something uh but the point is is that uh this is a sustainability program it’s a it’s a program where uh the United Nations is
Making sure that people are able to stay the course uh and that maybe when they’re contemplating making the journey uh and they’re not sure they have enough money they know in the back of their minds that they’ll kind of be okay so they’ll they’ll pull the trigger because the U.N will
Likely hand them cash or in these debit cards but it’s not just the debit cards they also are providing vouchers for long range Transportation they’re paying the bus fares the bus tickets and also for lodging in youth hostels or hostels and in hotels all along the way
Um when you when you take it all together they they have all of the basic necessities of life on the road to the us and that that is a real deal I know there’s been some uh challenge about that but there is a budget out that is
In a public realm uh where the United Nations says in 2023 they plan to spend 450 million dollars on cash-based assistance programs or cash-based intervention programs CBI and they just lay it out exactly what it’s for all three of those categories that I just told you wow jeez
Um and one other thing yeah I should mention that this is U.S taxpayer funded so that money’s come from there from Americans yes the majority of it yes geez so I I actually found some of the same things when I was down at the U.S Mexico border
Um from what I saw was the United Nations bankrolling a lot of it uh is that what you’re seeing as well it’s sorry it was through the state department bankrolling a lot of it do you also see it’s the state department bankrolling it through the U.N yes that’s that’s one of the major
Sources uh there’s a division of the state department that’s that’s doing that but but the United Nations is a multi-headed Hydra uh and uh so is the United States and its funding mechanisms so uh there’s money coming from all different places the uh you know from from the Congress from uh different
Parts of the executive branch and it’s really hard to figure out and untangle I still have not been able to untangle and neither have certain Congressional offices that are working pretty hard on this right now there’s a lot of outrage especially on the Republican side of the
Aisle that U.S taxpayer money is going to support Aid and abat uh this sort of travel activity smuggling activity if you will to sustain people on the way and that’s not all the money goes to a lot of that money goes to uh psychological programs on the trail uh
Where for example if migrants uh are turned down for asylum in Mexico they can’t proceed they’re stuck they have to apply for Asylum and get this card in order to get to the Border uh but if they get turned down they can go to one of these u.n-funded agencies and get uh
Memory excavation um uh have dramatically forgotten the actual persecution that that would get them the Asylum and it’s like 90 success rate and then they are able to continue on they also do a lot of training uh American lawyers uh for example are all over Mexico doing training sessions on
The your human rights under the U.S Asylum law which is basically a way to say watch out what you say to the Asylum officers uh here’s what you shouldn’t say and here’s what you should say so there’s a lot of stuff going on with the United Nations down there jeez now
You said something really interesting just a bit ago you said that the U.N budget just came out and the U.N budget just States in plain language that they have all this money for these programs tell us about the UN Budget on this well the U.N projects that it it it
Needs about 1.7 billion dollars for fiscal year 2023 and 2024 together to Aid the migrants and people who are in place waiting to to move and people that are actually moving uh that’s a large amount of money but it it is all uh distributed among about 221 non-governmental organizations
A great many of them are us-based organizations that have arms down there that are that are taking uh this cash and aiding and assisting the migrants down there uh and the budget document it’s online you can anybody can read it anybody can access it nobody has written
Anything about it other than me but you can um you know see the entire uh list of ngos right there and how much money uh that they’re that they’re each expected to need for their role in this Mass migration
