illegal immigration
‘Military-aged’ Chinese men are suspiciously gathering in Panama, journalist warns Tucker
From LifeSiteNews
By Matt Lamb
‘What I began to suspect was that the Chinese migration is actually being cloaked by the economic migration coming from South America,’ journalist Brett Weinstein told Tucker Carlson.
Young Chinese males are gathering en masse at a “camp” in Panama, an independent observer told Tucker Carlson recently.
Bret Weinstein is a former college professor and evolutionary biologist by training who was forced out of academia after opposing racial identity politics. He and his wife are now commentators and researchers willing to challenge liberal ideology on topics such as the COVID jabs.
San Vincente, Panama is not really a city, but rather a “camp,” Weinstein told Carlson.
“In this camp, the rule that you’re able to go in and walk around and talk to people, is not in evidence,” Weinstein said.
Guards did not let him in to the camp, but Weinstein was able to approach the Chinese migrants outside of the camp at several shops.
He said they are not willing to talk to outsiders.
“It is not a friendly migration,” Weinstein warned. He said most of the migrants are male and “military-aged.” There are “few, if any children,” in this group.
“What I began to suspect was that the Chinese migration is actually being cloaked by the economic migration coming from South America,” the journalist said. The Chinese migrants have a “different motivation,” he said. In fact, the migrants bypassed the more dangerous Darien Gap to get to Panama, since they have the money to hire boats.
“There was no desperation in evidence,” he told Tucker a few minutes later, saying that the people coming through were not people coming from poor countries. He also said his friend with him found a cartoon video in Chinese that appeared to show people how to travel through Central America.
The Darien Gap divides South America from Central America and is normally too dangerous to try to cross. However, there China, Weinstein suggested later in the interview, might be interested in closing the gap.
At just “one edge of the camp” he saw 150 people, but the amount must be much larger, he speculated.
His concerns are further confirmed by a recent “60 Minutes” report that found Chinese migrants are the “fastest growing group trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico.”
“Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 37,000 Chinese citizens were apprehended as they illegally crossed the border; that’s 50 times more than two years earlier,” CBS News reported.
Weinstein said that the mass migration through Central America into the U.S. begins in Ecuador, where people can enter without a visa.
He also said the United States and the United Nations are underwriting the migration, which is primarily economic, not political.
He said:
You see NGO emblems all over the place, proudly American flags. They’ve paid for the water system, the toilets that are there. The United States government is facilitating this economic migration. And it’s unmistakable, as is an organization called the IOM, which is the International Organization for Migration. It’s a branch of the UN. And if you read their charter, tou will discover that this organization believes that migration is an inherently good thing, that it’s always good. And so they see it as their job to bring it about to facilitate it. And in this case, that’s particularly tragic because their desire to induce people to migrate is causing people who are woefully unprepared for the Darien Gap to try to make that journey. And, the humanitarian tragedy is … immense.
He said border controls are “effectively lifted” at the Panama border. He lived and visited Panama decades ago and the situation was much different. “That’s clearly the result of a massive coordination. And, of course, it’s resulting in a large migration.”
Border patrol can, but isn’t, tracking migrants coming into the U.S.
Weinstein further warned that U.S. officials are not collecting basic “biometric” information on migrants that would be helpful identifying a “troublemaker.”
“What we’re doing at most is asking them their name and their birth date and taking them at their word,” he said. In contrast, he shared when he returned from Panama, a camera scanned his face and border patrol knew his name immediately.
Weinstein said he thinks “there is an invasion taking place” and referred to the migrants as “sleepwalkers” as opposed to sleeper cells.
“And there’s also a massive migration,” he told Carlson. “And the migration is causing us to have difficulty discussing the invasion, which is a distinct phenomenon.”
The Darien Gap, as noted, is dangerous to cross. The 60-mile-long Gap “hosts some of the highest mountain ridges in Panama, as well as hundreds of rivers and heavily forested valleys,” the pro-migration Human Rights Watch reported. “It is inhabited only sparsely, mostly by Indigenous communities and criminal gangs that benefit from the absence of government authorities.”
Yet, Weinstein suggests China might be looking to pave a passage through as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. The program involves China building infrastructure in different countries as part of a soft power approach.
“What many people who know about the Belt and Road Initiative don’t know is that they have also…the Belt and Road Initiative is largely about Africa and Asia, but apparently there’s been a considerable amount of thinking in China about how Belt and Road would work in the New World as well,” Weinstein said.
He said he observed a “massive concrete and steel highway bridge, being built over the to river into the Darién,” though it’s not clear who is building it.
Weinstein also warned that a plan by some Democratic leaders, such as Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, to make it easier for migrants to serve in the military is dangerous. He theorized that the COVID jab mandates were meant to create a military that was entirely “compliant’ and followed even immoral orders.
He said:
Now, what happens if migrants are given citizenship in exchange for military service in the U.S. military? That seems to create a major hazard, because the perverse incentives for a migrant and the lack of allegiance to fundamental American values means that that would be just the kind of force that could be used to impose tyranny on other Americans because they would have, you know, no history with us that would cause them to think twice.
The Chinese are long-term thinkers, Weinstein said, which causes him concern about what is happening.
“Maybe I’m imagining what I saw. But if I’m not, then all of those Chinese migrants who don’t want to talk about what they’re doing moving into the U.S.. They’re going to do something,” he said. “I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I don’t know when we became so naive about the fact that we have. There are parties abroad who do not wish us well and would not mind at all seeing us, removed from our position of power.”
Carlson noted there are plenty of economic opportunities in China and other surrounding countries.
The Darien Gap is not an “obvious” place for unemployed Chinese people, Carlson said.
Panama doesn’t seem concerned about mass migration
Though hundreds of thousands of people are moving through Panama, leaving trash and bodies behind, the country doesn’t seem concerned, Weinstein said.
“Mostly they don’t say anything. And what we were told was that this was kind of the deal, that if they ushered people through, they facilitated their movement, then those people would keep going,” he said. “And this is a temporary cost for Panama. I think if the people of Panama thought that the migration was going to stop and they were going to have to absorb all of these migrants, there would be riots in the streets.”
Weinstein concluded by reiterating his concerns about the COVID jabs. He called them “gene therapy.”
“The message that was injected into so many people was like a firmware update,” the evolutionary biologist said. “It was a firmware update that caused the immune systems of those people to take up a new way of viewing the world.” He and Tucker noted the Chinese had rejected the mRNA vaccines.
He questioned why, if the COVID shots were so good, they had to be forced onto people.
He called it “conspicuous” there was an “absolutely obsession” with everyone getting jabbed could not be explained just by corporate greed.
“And the fact that we specifically insisted on vaccinating the entire military and threw people out who wouldn’t take it. We vaccinated all of our frontline workers,” he said. He recalled what he told his wife during one show. “I said it, even if these are wonderful shots, it seems insane, given that we don’t know what their long-term impacts are, that we would vaccinate all of anybody with them.”
“Especially people we need,” Carlson said, referencing military and frontline healthcare workers.
“The people we need most,” Weinstein responded. He said more must be done to figure out what has been done with the shots and how to fix the harms.
If his concerns are real, “it is essential we figure out how to neutralize the vulnerability.”
Uzbek “special interest aliens” in Tapachula, Mexico after crossing from Guatemala on their way to the U.S. Southwest Border. January 2022 photo by Todd Bensman
By Todd Bensman as published June 12, 2024 by The New York Post
Near-misses from the worst mass migration border crisis in American history keep coming at us like machine-gun fire.
This month, FBI counterterrorism agents arrested six Tajikistani nationals on terrorism charges after they illegally crossed the southwest border from Mexico, apparently foiling a terror plot linked to the ISIS-K terror group in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The arrests came soon after a Russian who illegally crossed the border was convicted and sentenced in California on terrorism charges for buying weaponry for an al Qaeda group in Syria, as the FBI said he would have gone kinetic had he not been charged.
In May, a Jordanian national who illegally crossed the border from Mexico staged a vehicle ramming attack on Marine Corps Base Quantico that all involved federal agencies refuse to publicly rule out as a terror incident.
This year, Border Patrol agents overrun by the mass migration crisis have accidentally released at least seven immigrants who were on the FBI’s terrorism watch list when they illegally crossed the southern border, according to multiple reports, sparking frantic manhunts to capture them.
That’s just a fractional few of many disturbing cases.
For years prior to the historic mass migration crisis that President Biden kicked off on his inauguration day in 2021, the US media laughed off the threat of terrorist border infiltration as the stuff of baseless right-wing fear-mongering — such as when then-President Donald Trump said in 2018 that Middle Easterners were moving with US-bound caravans through Central America and Mexico.
Much good company has joined the once-ridiculed Paul Reveres, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and the apparently spooked authors of a surprisingly anxious Foreign Affairs magazine essay published this week.
But while many are sounding border infiltration alarms, few have offered solutions.
Perhaps Republican border hawks should turn to an unexpected ally: Democratic Party stalwart Jeh Johnson, President Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security.
In 2016, during his final months in office, Johnson became a true believer in the threat posed by “special interest aliens,” or SIAs: border-crossing migrants from 35 to 40 nations where Islamic terrorist groups are active.
After 9/11, one of the most important counterterrorism protocols implemented on the border required agents to detain all SIAs until they could undergo face-to-face interviews to determine if these total strangers harbored potential terror connections or intent.
In June 2016, Johnson was so fearful about SIA border crossers that he sent a memorandum to his top deputies demanding their “immediate attention” to “the increased global movement of SIAs.”
He ordered the formation of a “multi-DHS Component SIA Joint Action Group” that would assess the entire program and create a tightly coordinated international action plan to “counter the threats posed by the smuggling of SIAs.”
“I want to ensure we are bringing the full resources of the Department to bear in a coordinated manner on the issue of SIAs,” he wrote, to build on existing counter-SIA programs.
Johnson’s completely prudent plan to intensify the vetting of SIAs at the border and to take down terrorist smugglers in other countries got lost in the chaos of the transition to Donald Trump’s presidency.
His intended revamp never happened — and the catastrophic Biden-engineered mass migration crisis vaporized whatever was left of it.
While SIA traffic over the border had previously amounted to 3,000 to 4,000 individuals annually, SIA traffic since 2021 has reached an unimaginable 70,000 to 80,000 per year.
Federal intelligence and law enforcement officials could no longer interview even a smidgeon of those SIAs, who are mostly waved into the country with no interviews.
“Due to massive numbers of illegal aliens overwhelming CBP, in-depth face-to-face interviews are nonexistent,” former Chief Border Patrol Agent Rodney Scott testified before the House Judiciary Committee last September on the subject of terrorist border infiltration.
The first fix is, of course, almost too obvious to mention: Reduce the total numbers of illegal aliens pouring over the southwest border.
But the far less obvious fix is this one, regardless of how many are crossing: We must resurrect Johnson’s 2016 initiative to interview SIAs before they are released on asylum, and target their smugglers for prosecution and prison.
As importantly, we must adequately fund and equip this massive effort — no matter how many SIAs arrive.
If Johnson’s 2016 plan was nonpartisan enough for the Obama administration, it should be good enough for the Biden DHS, or a Trump one. And, we can hope, not too late to stop the next terrorism attempt within the United States.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “America’s Covert Border War” (2021).
illegal immigration
Potential game changer: Will Panama’s new President really ‘close’ the Darien Gap?
From the American Mind: A publication of the Claremont Institute
By Todd Bensman
Panama Pinch Point: Closing the Darien Gap would be a big step toward stopping the flow of migrants north.
Panama’s new president, Jose Raul Mulino, recently began his five-year term with a keynote promise that may help decide the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Mulino has vowed to “close” the infamous “Darien Gap” immigrant passageway over the border from Colombia to Panama, the jungled 70-mile bottleneck of wilderness foot trails through which nearly 1.5 million immigrants from 150 nations have passed to the besieged U.S. Southwest Border.
“The border of the United States, instead of being in Texas, moved to Panama,” said Mulino, who served as security minister under former president Ricardo Martinelli. “We’re going to repatriate all those people.”
Elsewhere since, Mulino doubled down on his promise to “end the odyssey of the Darien.”
“Those from here,” he said in a May 9 speech, referring to his country. “And those who would like to come know that whoever arrives here will return to their country of origin. Our Darien is not a transit route. No sir. That is our border.”
That warning shot alone, by a sitting executive of Panama, has reverberated throughout the Western Hemisphere but has drawn little public analysis. For starters, the vow signaled a sharply lower trajectory to the historic U.S. mass migration border crisis, which I predicted in December 2020 would emanate from the Gap and did so in numbers that rocketed skyward after Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
Whereas fewer than 20,000 each year went through the Darien for decades, Biden’s border policies, featuring high-percentage acceptance of illegal entries and quick releases into the American interior, beckoned more than 130,000 immigrants from a great diversity of nations to cross the gap that first year of 2021. The number shot to 250,000 by the end of 2022, then 520,000 during 2023 and is on pace to a projected 800,000 before 2024 is out.
Inadvertently or not, Mulino’s closure of the Darien Gap more than three years into this torrent can only help President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, a border crisis that polls regularly show tops the most important problem list for the U.S. presidential election.
The big question that begs analysis is whether President Mulino can or will follow through on the aspiration and relieve Panama as perhaps the world’s most trammeled immigration transit nation, ease the crushing fiscal burdens pushing destination U.S. cities toward bankruptcy, and save Biden from voter punishment for it all in November.
The short answer is that Mulino seems determined to give this a real yeoman’s effort. For instance, he has already begun groundwork, like appointing as Security Minister Frank Abrego, founder of Panama’s Border Police (SENAFRONT) who is known as a close-the-gap hawk with deep experience battling Colombian rebels in Darien and who is already preparing trail “checkpoints.” His main given mission, according to local media accounts is to close the gap.
But any early optimism by Biden’s campaign managers or long-suffering American cities must be tempered by the fact that powerful forces are arrayed to prevent Mulino’s success. Those would include liberal progressive open borders elements in Biden’s government who want mass migration; United Nations and non-governmental migrant advocacy agencies set up in Panama’s “City of Knowledge” that also want the unprecedented revenue that has bloated them; and a Colombian government that would be stuck with backlogged immigrant populations.
The prognosis for Mulino’s success, in my opinion and of others familiar with Panamanian immigration politics, is not good despite his best intentions.
Minding the Gap
What Mulino has proposed is a dramatic 180-degree policy swivel for the isthmian nation that portends a seismic earthquake to be felt around the world. Knowing how human traffic funnels into this narrow, blockade-able channel is essential to understanding what he has in mind and what would happen afterward.
To reach the gap, immigrants in South America move toward Caribbean beach towns like Necocli and Turbo in the far northwestern corner of Colombia, on the east side of the Gulf of Uraba.
With Colombia’s full acquiescence along that shoreline, the immigrants pile into passenger ferries and other boats that cross them west across the gulf and land them on beaches closer to Panama, whence trailheads start inland. From these trailheads, migrants typically have to cross some 60 or more roadless miles of wilderness mountains and rivers to reach the Panamanian border, which once took up to a week or longer. More recently, a shorter river route was opened.
Once on the Panama side, prevailing policy had immigrants and SENAFRONT border police looking to unite with one another for one of the most unusual policies in the world: a government human smuggling policy called “controlled flow.”
As I first reported in late 2018 from Darien Province, the outrageous controlled flow policy, presumably about to be cancelled, aimed to make sure migrants did not have a chance to linger in Panama. Once SENAFRONT has custody of the gap-exiting immigrants, the agency transports or directs them to various expanding hospitality camps near a main highway where they are fed, sheltered, treated if sick, and given access to money-wiring services and communications.
Then, SENAFRONT organizes commercial bus caravans to drive them all on to Costa Rica, whose own government checks them in and transports them north for delivery to criminal smuggling groups in towns along Nicaragua’s border for the leg to Honduras, as I reported in a three-part 2022 series from that region.
While Panama and Costa Rica may have to shoulder increasing costs of running camps and buses, at least they weren’t the ones getting stuck with the hot potato of needy immigrant populations. They move that hot potato from Colombia to the United States, which never objected to these government passing it on, not even Republican Donald Trump.
But while the Trump administration seemed ignorant of controlled flow, the Biden administration’s liberal progressive wing, its titular head being DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, strongly embraced it and went to great lengths to expand it. This policy was instituted by the hard left wing of the Biden administration and the non-governmental migrant advocacy organizations that engineered the mass migration logistics, as I document in my book Overrun.
In 2022, the Biden government got Panama to vastly expand the capacity and speed of the controlled flow on the grounds that this would save the lives of immigrants who’d answered Biden’s opened borders invitation. The Biden administration’s progressives, for instance, convinced Panama to open Caribbean Sea access to a navigable Panamanian river that dramatically shortened the difficult foot journeys. The years 2022 and 2023 and 2024 were historic as more than a million foreign nationals came to traverse the shorter, faster, safer route that Biden’s progressives engineered.
At administration urging and with U.S. taxpayer money, the two countries built new hospitality camps and expanded existing ones, improved trail conditions, mounted bridge projects over dangerous rivers, and brought in dozens of UN and non-governmental organizations to manage migration aid and support from Panama’s so-called “City of Knowledge.”
The U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) began showering many hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds on advocacy groups that set up shop in Panama and exerted political influence in a country known for its susceptibility to government corruption, a place the the CIA’s World Factbook calls a historic money-laundering and illegal drug trafficking hub.
It was against all this momentum that Panama’s new president suddenly announced he was going to shut the whole thing down.
Disruption of an Established Order
In my 2021 book America’s Covert Border War, I discussed the Darien Gap as a U.S. national security threat because it has enabled terrorist travel to the American border. I proposed a set of policies that would be bought and paid for by a mythological U.S. administration that really would one day want – or need – to seal the Gap after, say, a terror attack. An American administration could impose robust ICE Air deportation flight operations on the supposedly allied nations of Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico. U.S. taxpayers would foot the bill because those countries should not be asked to pick up the tab for U.S. national security.
The Biden administration cannot be counted on to go that far for reasons that will be explained shortly. But I and other experts who have witnessed the flow in these countries believe the volume of migrants can still be reduced.
“Physically, he can shut the border. He can do it if he’s got the guts. He can do it tomorrow,” says independent blogger and war correspondent Michael Yon in reference to Mulino. Yom, who has spent the past two years living and reporting on all sides of the Darien Gap, knows its surrounding geography or politics better than almost anyone. He says Mulino can shut down most human traffic through the gap and deter any further movement using the very same measures Panama used when Covid hit and it closed its borders to Colombia.
At any given time, about 5,000 are moving through the gap. Let them pass through as the last ones under the “controlled flow” regime, Yon suggests.
Then, Mulino can start the program by having SENAFRONT intercept Colombia boat traffic moving almost all the immigrants across the Gulf of Uraba.
“Seize any boats and people will get the hint really quick,” Yon said. “Once people start losing those expensive boats, that’ll do it. They’ll be on the phone reporting back, ‘Hey I’ve been arrested in Panama, and they took my boat.’ That’ll do it right there. Right away.”
Those who get through and onto the trails will need to find a similarly rude awakening in SENAFRONT officers not interested in rescue so much as detention and expulsion, in Yon’s expert view. They’ll all go into hospitality camps converted into real detention camps, only to be kicked back as soon as practicable to Colombia.
“Make it all Colombia’s problem, and you’ll see Colombia stop them,” Yon said, referring again to the dynamics seen during Covid. “If it worked for Covid, and we know that they did it then, it’ll work now too.”
Yon’s point is supported by data. A 2020 United Nations report credited a Panamanian coronavirus quarantine with significantly deterring migration by containing those SENAFRONT caught in camps indefinitely. Numbers of border crossers dropped from 24,000 in 2019 when controlled flow was in use, to only 4,000 in 2020 when Panama opened detention camps.
Migrants stopped trying the Gap in large numbers when word of indefinite Panamanian detention got back to Colombia, which then had to close its own borders lest it too get stuck with huge numbers of immigrants, the hot potato.
Next up, according to Yon: revoke all visas and immediately expel every United Nations agency and all the non-governmental organizations whose work and aid incentivize the traffic. These agencies, fat with U.S. tax money, will try to use political influence in the Panamanian congress or in Mulino’s own administration to undermine the new policies.
“Put police on their doors, and tell them it’s time to pack up and leave right now,” Yon said.
But while Panama’s narrow geography would allow a determined president to almost certainly replicate Covid-era border closure and detention with expulsion policies, Yon said he’ll need “guts” to stay the course when political pushback immediately begins that Mulino might not be able to withstand.
He’ll get it from the government of Colombia. From the United Nations and NGOs profiting by the flow. From elements of U.S. government that believe in open borders.
The key weapon they will deploy is a global disinformation media campaign that will paint Panama’s president as inhumane to marshal global sanctions and other economic repercussions.
“They’ll hit him hardcore in the press. They’ll show kids dying in the jungle,” Yon said. “It takes damn the torpedoes, and then just see what their best looks like, and if you don’t make it, you don’t make it. But I think he can do it.”
Joseph M. Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society and Latin America expert, also believes Mulino is serious about trying to close the gap. His predictions about the pushback mirror Yon’s, especially from the NGO industry which has used its largess to build lobbying influence both in Panama and the United States, and which has a financial interest in keeping the migrants flowing.
“If he actually tries to do things to close the border, I see a disinformation campaign against him that will charge him with violating human rights,” Humire said. “The amount of money that industry has established is pretty big. We’ll see how much they put their money where their mouth is to keep the Darien Gap open.”
In turn, media disinformation campaigns that will tar Mulino as evil should enable open-border progressives inside the Biden administration to argue against U.S. support for a gap closure, even though such a closure would aid the American president’s incumbency at least until November.
“The Biden administration will want to work with him, at least on paper,” Humire said. “But at the same time, I feel like the pressure mechanisms of these NGOs with the disinformation campaign will scare away the Biden administration.”
In short, Mulino will walk his own trail very much alone.
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