Todd Bensman, Senior Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said that the current quick-release border policy has allowed historic numbers of Chinese nationals to illegally cross the southern border. Bensman made this statement during a Congressional hearing titled “Chinese Immigration Over the U.S. Southwest Border.”
"More Chinese nationals are now crossing the Southwest border near San Diego than Mexican nationals,” said Bensman, according to Homeland Security Committee.
Bensman testified before the House Homeland Security Committee (Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Accountability) during the hearing led by the Subcommittee Chairman, Dan Bishop (R-NC). Bensman was joined by testimonies from Simon R. Hankinson, a Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Craig Singleton, China Program Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and Dr. Meredith Oyen, a professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Maryland.
Since Biden took office, the number of Chinese encounters at the border has increased from around 12 a month to almost 6,000 during 2024, according to the testimony. There have been 50,000 U.S. Border Patrol encounters with Chinese nationals, 43,000 of whom were designated as single adults. Of these 50,000, 35,000 entered via Mexico’s Baja State into California, while most others entered the U.S. in Texas. Bensman said that the increase of immigrants crossing the border has been caused by the current quick-release policy that is in place, where immigrants receive a “Notice to Appear (NTA), meaning they are supposed to voluntarily reappear before Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for an asylum petition. Given the backlog of appointments, Chinese nationals are granted “quick releases into the interior for years-long stays that are, essentially, permanent.”
Bensman also said that while there is no factual proof that the Chinese government is initiating a secret invasion of the U.S. via the border, the unpunished actions of the current immigrants suggest that a national security threat is not far off. Chinese immigrants have continually disregarded the U.S. law through fraud, deceit, and destroying of personal identity documents in order to remain in the country. While Bensman recognized that these actions are not a matter of national security, he said the current policies “have created ideal conditions for the CCP to send spies and political agents into the United States.”
“The CCP sees the Southwest border as a new, wide-open avenue of approach through which to infiltrate its spies and intelligence operatives with far lower risks of detection than the traditional use of legal visas,” Bensman said in his testimony. “They will eventually position themselves or recruit other recent crossers to carry out a clear-cut Chinese strategic agenda to steal military-use and industrial technology or to conduct political suppression operations against Chinese American citizens and legal residents.”
Todd Bensman is an author and journalist who frequently reports on the US border, according to his website. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and was previously the Manager for the Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.
