On Wednesday on “The Ben Shapiro Show,” Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro interviewed a leading expert on the southern border crisis, Anthony Rubin, one of the only journalists to have ever traveled and documented the entire mass migration route from Quito, Ecuador, to the U.S. border.
Asked about the route, Rubin, the founder of muckraker.com, stated, “The whole world is flying into Quito, Ecuador, because it’s got the easiest entry requirements basically of any country in the world. And then from there, they are crossing into Colombia illegally and trekking all the way up to the United States, country by country, crossing through the Darien Gap Jungle … making the way all the way up here aided by the United Nations and associated organizations along the way.”
“Who actually is trafficking people?” Shapiro asked. “At what point do drug cartels take over? Is it individuals? Is it groups?”
“A lot of people think when you when you’re talking to them about this that it’s like one continuous caravan all the way from Ecuador to the U.S. border,” Rubin answered. “It doesn’t really work like that. You’re with a group that’s continuously changing. You’ll be with one group entering the Darien Gap, then you’ll pop out, and then that group kind of splits apart as people travel at their own pace. And then another group will form at the northern part of Panama and then a group will continue to gather and you’ll get another caravan that’ll form at southern Mexico.”
“And so it’s always kind of shifting and evolving,” he continued. “But as far as the groups that bring you through, the groups that brought us through the Darien Gap, there are many routes that you can take through there. The route that we took was the route that is used by special interest aliens. That would be anybody that’s coming from countries that perhaps harbor terrorists, that have state-sponsored terrorism.”
“It could also be countries such as China, Russia, people that have a little bit more money,” he said. “And so this route, what happens is you actually have to get smuggled into Panama by boats. You actually are already starting in Panamanian territory. And then you actually trek east to west through the jungle until you hit Highway 1. And so that’s the route that we took. Along that route, it’s indigenous tribes that are guiding you through the jungle. You could still die in there. These indigenous tribes are still armed. “
“In Mexico, we ran into at least three cartels; we were going to cross into the United States, right where Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in Boca Chica, Texas. We were walking up this public Mexican beach, just public coastline right there next to the Gulf of Mexico, and we got picked up by this truck who told us we can’t go any further; it’s going to be trouble for you if you keep walking up there,” he recalled. “This truck starts driving us back down south to where we came from and pulled up next to another pickup truck that was filled with three armed men. These are serious guys carrying assault rifles … they just start screaming at us. They order us out of this one truck into their truck, and they drive us inland. And about 10 minutes inland, they pull us out of the truck, lay out all the stuff where they can find our drone and our camera, and now they’re thinking that perhaps we are spying on them. They don’t know what’s going on. So they start searching us for wires. They put us on our knees, they take hostage-type photos.”
“And during this time, another truck with four more armed men has pulled up with another seven armed men surrounding us,” he continued. “It’s not looking good. I’m you know, I’m trying to keep my cool. But certainly you start to realize that this situation is long . … And what happens is they tie up our hands, they throw a blindfold on myself.”
“Eventually the doors open up, the car stops and we’re in the middle of an empty field,” he said. “And I’m not sure what’s about to happen, but it doesn’t look good, right? But they lay out all of our electronics and they take out a crowbar and they smash everything to bits and pieces, and then they load it into another car and drop us off at the port of entry and basically say, never come back here again.”
“I’ve been down to the southern border myself; the drug cartels have total control over America’s southern border. I wonder if that was your experience as well,” Shapiro commented.
“Absolutely,” Rubin answered. “And you know, it’s not just the southern border or the northern border of Mexico. It’s throughout Mexico. The drug cartels are in control of that entire route. And what’s incredible is you have the United Nations and associated organizations that are handing out maps, ‘migration route maps’ to say ‘Here’s where you need to cross into Mexico. Here’s the route you’re going to take or the routes you can take through Mexico. Here’s the different crossing points of the United States.’ And all of those points are controlled by the cartel. It’s known that if you’re going to cross at any of those points, you’re going have to pay a human smuggler that is associated with the drug cartel … that’s the only way you’re actually going to be able to pass through. And so these, quote-unquote, ‘humanitarian organizations’ are really lining or helping to line the pockets of the cartel with millions, perhaps billions of dollars. That’s not an estimate that I made up. Those are legitimate estimates by people who have studied this and crunched the numbers.”
“For example, when we rode the Mexican train of death, that’s the train that runs across Mexico; it’s based like a freight train,” he stated. “And you will see illegal aliens riding on the top of it. The men who loaded us up onto the top of that train were serious cartel men in the middle of the night. these are men that are entirely masked up. They’re wearing body armor. They actually had swords tucked behind their body armor … I wasn’t aware what the swords were for at first. And then later I find out that’s because if they need to kill somebody, they don’t want to make any noise. That’s why they have the sword. And of course, they’re carrying assault rifles or shotguns. And these are the men that are loading you up onto the train of death in the middle of the night. So there’s nothing humanitarian about it. And yet all of Mexico, at least the parts where this route is going through, it’s all controlled by the cartel.”