Todd Bensman, senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Stephen K. Bannon on Saturday’s edition of WarRoom that the Biden Administration helped cause the current chaos in Haiti by scuttling free and fair elections in that Caribbean nation back in 2021.
“I want to go back on why on the 16th of March in the year of our Lord 2024 we’ve got Marines getting ready to go to Haiti, We’ve got DeSantis calling up law enforcement, we’ve got people in Florida panicked that hundreds of thousands of Haitians are going to come to Florida, we have a migrant young girl, 15 years old, raped in a hotel, in a motel funded by NGOs with a Haitian illegal alien allegedly raping her,” Bannon began.
Bannon then went on to discuss the cover photo on Bensman’s recently released book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
“What is that picture of? That photo on the cover of your book?
“That is the Del Rio Migrant Camp Crisis at its peak, September, 2021,” Bensman said.
“That photo is significant to the book because there’s a whole chapter on the crisis, but within the book also are revelations. That crisis in Del Rio, Texas led the Biden administration to make decisions that scuttled Haitian democracy,” he continued. (emphasis added)
“The picture of Del Rio, that is Del Rio, Texas. That’s about as far away from Haiti as you can get. And that migrant camp is what was the inciting incident on this whole illegal alien invasion of our country. That’s when the whole nation woke up and said ‘whoa, what’s happening?’ Biden realized they had a PR problem and they had an optics problem immediately that camp rattled inside the Biden Regime – not to change their policies, but they had to change the optics of their policies,” Bannon added. (emphasis added)
“What did they do specifically to Haiti? They couldn’t take the optics of Haitians coming across a bridge from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas and then waiting under that bridge. . . They had those optics that were going to destroy Biden in the midterm, destroy his illegitimate regime and force him out of the office he had usurped… So tell me what they did? Bannon asked.
“So this was a year before the midterms. Everybody was thinking already, how we were in the campaign season. For the midterm elections, 2022, this thing is just growing by leaps and bounds. Thousands more were on the way. They had to do something dramatic and deterring to liquidate that camp,” Bensman answered.
“What they came up with was deportation flights, ICE Air putting thousands of them on flights back to Port au Prince, which is the most horrifying thing that any of these Haitians could contemplate because they had spent tens of thousands of dollars getting this far. They thought they were on the cusp of getting into the U.S. The administration needed, in order to do deportation flights like Trump [did during his administration], you have to have permission from the receiving country. At that time, you had Dr. Ariel Henry as the provisional prime minister of Haiti. The former president [Jovenel Moïse] had just been assassinated the month before. And there were big elections coming up where he [Dr. Ariel Henry] might get swept out and somebody else might get put in for Haiti,” he continued.
They were going to have their first parliamentary elections, their first legitimate presidential elections in two months, but the Biden administration is worried about the 2022 elections. And they had to get rid of this camp right away. And that’s what they did,” Bensman explained.
“What did they do to get rid of the camp?” Bannon asked.
“The first thing they did was they had the state department scuttle Haiti’s elections,” Bensman said.
“Remember this was going to be their very first election, their first presidential in years and years. That was seen by the international community as the first necessary step to set Haiti up for stability, for real governance, for going forward,” he added.
“Instead, the Biden administration needed that camp gone. So they scuttled Haiti’s elections to get permission [from Dr. Ariel Henry] to deport them [the thousands of Haitians at the migrant camp in Mexico the across the border from Del Rio, Texas] into Port au Prince. That’s what happened. They killed those elections out two months beforehand. They deported a whole bunch of Haitians there,” Bensman continued.
“And now [in 2024], we’re seeing what happened as a result. Had they [Haiti] had those elections [in November 2021], had they elected a new president and a parliament, a lot of what we’re seeing [now]probably would not have happened at all,” Bensman asserted.
But the [Biden] administration did do this, and I have that from his own Special Envoy to Haiti [Daniel Foote] in an interview in that book describing everything that happened. He was so angry about it that he resigned office. Ahead of these elections, he saw these elections getting scuttled for a short term political gain for the administration. And he couldn’t take it, and he quit as a result. Nobody told the story. I called him up and did a long interview with him and he laid it all out. . . He goes, ‘They came in and they just killed these elections that everybody had been working for years to finally get Haiti on track for a short term political gain, I couldn’t take it, I quit.’ ”
Foote served as U.S. Ambassador to Zambia from 2017 to 2020. Previously, he had extensive experience serving in Latin America, the Middle East, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
You can watch the full Saturday March 16, 2024 interview of Todd Bensman on Stephen K. Bannon’s WarRoom here:
Todd Bensman will be interviewed on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show at 11:30 am CT on Monday, March 18.
Later in that same show, former U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti Daniel Foote will be interviewed at 1:05 CT, also on Monday March 18.
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Michael Patrick Leahy is the founder and CEO of the Star News Network, which includes The Tennessee Star. Follow Leahy on X at @michaelpleahy.
Photo “Todd Bensman” by CIS.org.
