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Hundreds of thousands of migrants are being held in southern Mexico until US Election Day

Published

1 year ago

4 minute read

From The Center for Immigration Studies

By Todd Bensman

TAPACHULA, Mexico — This town near the border of Guatemala holds a migrant time bomb ready to go off just after the US presidential election.

The fuse was lit in December 2023, when the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration sent senior lieutenants to Mexico to work out the details of what remains a highly mysterious grand diplomatic bargain.

Worried about what the optics of the southern border would do to their re-election chances — though not the migrant crisis itself — the White House wanted to stop the pictures of crowds of people gathered at the wall.

The deal was to have Mexico deploy 32,500 troops to the US border to round up untold thousands of intending border crossers from the northern precincts and force-ship them — “internal deportation” by planes and buses — thousands of miles to Mexico’s southern provinces and entrap them in cities like Tapachula in Chiapas state behind militarized roadblocks.

Mexico closed off most of its freight trains to migrant free riders, bulldozed northern camps, and patrolled relentlessly for more deportee targets.

Meanwhile, the administration increased “parole” programs that flew migrants directly from countries like Venezuela, thus avoiding the border entirely.

The effect was immediate. Illegal border crossings plummeted from an embarrassing, record-breaking 12,000 to 14,000 per day in November and December 2023 to about 3,000 or 4,000 per day before January was even over.

But the crisis isn’t over.

The just-released 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment from the Department of Homeland Security says the decrease in illegal border crossing is largely due to “increased Mexican enforcement efforts.”

What happens if that enforcement stops?

Tapachula is bursting at the seams.

No one really knows how many people are stacked up, but local shelter managers reported to me that they had filled up long ago.

The publisher of Noticia De Tapachula, the daily newspaper, told me 150,000 immigrants were in town at any given time, a 42% increase in the city’s normal population of 350,000. Untold thousands more are stacked up in Villahermosa, a city of 830,000.

Mexico’s response has been to try to spread the immigrants around the southern portion of the country.

I spent time at two different roadside areas where federal immigration officers would call out names from the crowd, who would board buses that delivered them to other regional cities in Chiapas — but NOT beyond them and certainly never beyond Mexico City.

Mexico is still trying to hold up its end of the bargain, at least until November 5, even though more migrants are starting to slip through and making it over the Texas or California borders.

The question is what happens after the American election.

No matter who wins, Mexico might well consider that it more than satisfied its obligation to the current White House occupant and open the floodgates.

If it’s Donald Trump, Americans should expect a massive tidal wave of caravans for the 10 weeks before Inauguration Day. All the migrants I’ve spoken to say they fear a Trump presidency, and will rush to the border in a last-ditch attempt.

If it’s Harris, perhaps the massive tidal wave will go on for the next four years, much like the last four.

Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Pro-freedom group warns Liberal bill could secretly cut off Canadians’ internet access

Published on November 3, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

“The minister could order this dissident’s internet and phone services be cut off and require that decision remain secret”

Free speech advocates have warned that the Liberals’ cybersecurity bill would allow them to block any individual’s internet access by secret order.

During an October 30 Public Safety committee meeting in the House of Commons, Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) counsel Josh Dehaas called for Liberals to rewrite Bill C-8, which would allow the government to secretly cut off Canadians access to the internet to mediate “any threat” to the telecommunications system.

“It is dangerous to civil liberties to allow the minister the power to cut off individual Canadians without proper due process and keep that secret,” Dehaas testified.

“Consider for example a protestor who the minister believes ‘may’ engage in a distributed denial of service attack, which is a common form of civil disobedience employed by political activists,” he warned.

“The minister could order this dissident’s internet and phone services be cut off and require that decision remain secret,” Dehaas continued, adding that the legislation does not require the government to obtain a warrant.

In response, Liberal MP Marianne Dandurand claimed that the legislation is aimed to protect the government form cyberattacks, not to limit freedom of speech. However, Dehaas pointed out that the vague phrasing of the legislation allows Liberals to censor Canadians to counter “any threat” to the telecommunications system.

Bill C-8, which is now in its second reading in the House of Commons, was introduced in June by Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree and contains a provision in which the federal government could stop “any specified person” from accessing the internet.

The federal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that the bill is a way to stop “unprecedented cyber-threats.”

The bill, as written, claims that the government would need the power to cut someone off from the internet, as it could be “necessary to do so to secure the Canadian telecommunications system against any threat, including that of interference, manipulation, disruption, or degradation.”

“Experts and civil society have warned that the legislation would confer ministerial powers that could be used to deliberately or inadvertently compromise the security of encryption standards within telecommunications networks that people, governments, and businesses across Canada rely upon, every day,” the Canadian Civil Liberties Association wrote in a recent press release.

Similarly, Canada’s own intelligence commissioner has warned that the bill, if passed as is, could potentially be unconstitutional, as it would allow for warrantless seizure of a person’s sensitive information.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Senate Grills Meta and Google Over Biden Administration’s Role in COVID-Era Content Censorship

Published on November 2, 2025

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By Cindy Harper

Lawmakers pressed Meta and Google to explain how far White House outreach went in shaping their censorship decisions.

A Senate hearing this week discussed government influence on online speech, as senior executives from Meta and Google faced questions about the Biden administration’s communications with their companies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The session, titled “Part II of Shut Your App: How Uncle Sam Jawboned Big Tech Into Silencing Americans,” highlighted the growing concern in Washington over what lawmakers describe as government-driven pressure to suppress lawful expression.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who led the hearing, began by declaring that “the right to speak out is the foundation of a free society” and warning that “censorship around the world is growing.”
He accused the Biden administration of pushing technology companies to restrict Americans’ speech during the pandemic, and he faulted both the companies and Democrats for failing to resist that pressure.
“Today, we pick off where the story left off,” Cruz said, pointing to Meta and Google as examples of firms that “were pressured by the Biden administration to censor the American people.”
He pledged to introduce the Jawbone Act, which he said would “provide a robust right to redress when Americans are targeted by their own government.”
Markham Erickson, Google’s Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy, defended the company’s approach, emphasizing that its moderation decisions are guided by long-standing internal policies, not by government direction.
“While we are a company dedicated to the goal of making the world’s information universally accessible, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have certain rules,” Erickson said, citing restrictions on “terrorist content, child sexual abuse material, hate speech, and other harmful content.”
He acknowledged that officials in the Biden administration had contacted Google during the pandemic to urge the removal of certain COVID-19 content from YouTube.
But Erickson maintained that the company “develop[ed] and enforce[d] our policies independently” and “rejected suggestions that did not align with those policies.”
Erickson also alleged that Google has a record of resisting censorship demands from foreign governments, citing its refusal to remove politically sensitive videos in Russia despite threats of imprisonment against employees and fines “that exceed more than the world’s GDP.”
Neil Potts, Meta’s Vice President of Public Policy, took a more reflective stance.
He reiterated that Meta has a “foundational commitment to free expression” and acknowledged that the company had yielded to “repeated pressure” from the Biden White House to restrict COVID-related posts, including satire and humor.
“We believe that government pressure was wrong and wish we had been more outspoken about it,” Potts said. He added that Meta “should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction.”
Potts pointed to policy changes the company has made since then, such as ending its third-party fact-checking program, reducing restrictions on political topics, and adopting what he described as “a more personalized approach to political content.”
These steps, he said, were intended to “return to our ideals about free expression” and “allow for more speech.”
Senator Cruz pressed both executives on whether their companies regretted complying with government demands.
Potts responded that Meta “do[es] regret our actions for not speaking out more forcefully.”
Erickson, however, declined to use similar language, saying Google regularly receives “outreach from a lot of actors” and evaluates flagged material independently.
The exchange grew more pointed as Cruz questioned Google’s removal of a YouTube video that compiled election-fraud claims made by both major parties. Erickson conceded, “Yes, that is news,” when Cruz asked whether statements by presidential candidates about election integrity should be considered newsworthy.
But Erickson defended YouTube’s policies during the 2020 election, saying that after states had certified results, the company acted against “claims of widespread fraud” due to potential “real-world harm.”
Cruz accused Google of ideological bias and suggested the company was “unwilling to express regret for anything at all.”
He contrasted that with Meta’s statement of remorse and concluded that Google’s position reflected “a level of contempt for free speech that does not reflect well.”
Where Erickson had insisted that Google “continued to develop and enforce our policies independently,” the company’s letter to Congress acknowledged that “Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach” urging the removal of COVID-19 content that did not violate platform rules.
This was somewhat of a departure from the defensive posture Google maintained before the Senate.
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Every issue we publish is part of a larger fight: preserving the principles that built this country and protecting them from erosion in the digital age.
With your help, we can do more than simply hold the line: we can push back. We can shine a light on censorship, expose growing surveillance overreach, and give a voice to those being silenced.
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