by Frank Holmes, reporter
Human smuggling cartels use all kinds of weapons to ply their trade—but one of the most powerful and effective is one you may be holding in your hand.
One of the top tools of the trafficking trade is the selfie, an immigration expert has revealed.
Drug cartels, enormous caravans, and individual illegal aliens use the innocuous and universal action of posting selfies to communicate with networks throughout Latin America—and across the world—that they should come to the United States, and to tell them the best routes to take.
“The intelligence networks don’t just tell with text. They show,” wrote Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, in the New York Post.
The Center for Immigration Studies is Washington’s most influential think tank dedicated to analyzing immigration, but Bensman is no armchair warrior. He’s personally traveled to the border, and well south of it, interviewing thousands of people from around the world who are crossing into the United States illegally.
He said they showed him the way the simple selfie bounces around chat rooms, internet forums, and instant messages to those waiting in their home countries. “The network reports up-trail conditions, border crossings, violence, smuggling fees, and especially the availability of free stuff like clothes, food and shelter to those who are still down-trail,” Bensman wrote.
The photos are concrete pieces on intelligence for everyone considering making the trip across the Rio Grande, including international drug cartels and human smugglers, known as coyotes. While they hear reports from people all over the world, pictures “offered ground truth amid smoke, fog and mirrors.” They help them “know that this is how things really work out there.”
The selfies even help grandstanding liberals like New York Mayor Eric Adams fall into his own trap. Adams has invited illegal aliens to come to the Big Apple and pledged to give them all the resources the city’s welfare system could provide. Now, he’s calling on the federal government to bail him out and begging Texas Governor Greg Abbott to call off the handful of buses to the five boroughs.
“If immigrants are showing up to the same New York homeless shelters and nonprofit storefronts where free goods and assistance is being handed out, you can be sure that all of that information is making it back to the Texas border and beyond, influencing decisions to head for the Big Apple on Abbott’s buses,” wrote Bensman. “If knowledge is power and a picture worth a thousand words, no clarion call has more influence on migrant decisions and action than video selfies loosed from cellphones.”
That’s led to an invasion of the U.S. A mind-blowing 4.9 million illegal aliens have entered the United States since President Joe Biden took office less than two years ago. That includes 3.9 million illegals reported by the Border Patrol and the 900,000 “gotaways” acknowledged by the agency, according to a new report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
Things are so bad that Biden now brags when he doesn’t set new monthly records of illegal immigration. Border Patrol agents encountered 199,976 illegal immigrants in July, down from 207,933 in June and 213,593 in July 2021.
That’s a long way from the amount of illegal immigration the American people want and U.S. law demands, which is zero.
The vast majority of those who cross the U.S. border illegally come here for the cash. Between July 2021 and July 2022, the Department of Homeland Security processed 1.079 million illegal immigrants at the southern border, and only 41,206 qualified to even apply for asylum, according to Bensman’s colleague at CIS, Andrew Arthur. The rest came here because they could make more money in the U.S., even if they came illegally.
There’s definitely some bad news: deaths of people trying to reach the United States reached a record-breaking 609 people.
But people from the Southern Hemisphere are willing to take the change because, under Biden, asylum applications hit an all-time high, while deportations have fallen to one-fifth of the level under President Donald Trump.
They don’t have to read white papers from think tanks, check official government statistics, or wait for word to leak out through the media. They can see it all on their smart phones, just like some of you are reading The Horn on your handheld device.
They see a border in chaos, big corporations eager to hire them (and fire Americans), and an administration rolling out the red carpet.
“The entire Latin America world was watching — on their cellphones,” wrote Bensman. “They’re coming next.”
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”