Wednesday, October 14, 2026

We followed the illegal immigration pipeline from Africa into and across Europe. REPLACING EUROPE - FULL DOCUMENTARY Over two months, we traced how tens of thousands of illegal aliens are moved into and across Europe, and who’s making it happen. In this documentary, you’ll see: • A UN migration worker admitting that governments profit from illegal immigration and have no interest in stopping it. • Illegal immigrants getting flown by plane to the European mainland. • Organizations openly guiding illegal immigrants across borders. We were violently attacked and nearly arrested for exposing how Europe is being replaced.

Watch the full documentary and share it with the world. 

TRANSCRIPT

Along the way, we discovered how criminal organizations, NGOs, and national governments are facilitating the invasion of the European continent.  Europeans aren't just losing their nations, they're funding their own replacement.

1:31  The mafia work with the police.  The police here . . . they don't want for it to stop.

1:59  Opens in Nouadhibou, Mauritania.

12:08.  What exactly were the police and the NGO workers trying to hide?

Why is documenting this process such a threat to understand the answer a veteran friend of the migrant Street Aid industry with over a decade inside the system when we met him he was working for the United Nations International Organization for Migration on the Canary Islands.

Carlos Brito, Mayor of Valverde, El Hierro.

Francis Mendoza, Civil Protection Coordinator, El Hierro.

Elma Saiz Delgado, Spain's Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration. 

What he revealed explains why this operation depends so heavily on secrecy.

I'm here as a UN representative here.  I am the only one here in Canarios [Canary Islands].  Yeah, from the IOM.  The entire migration is a game. Everyone wants to have their share.  Every boat that arrives here, the mafia gets between 50 to 60,000 Euros.. it's a game, it is a game.  So long as money is involved, when money is involved, everything is . . . money moves mountains, my brother.  

12:57.  But what I'm saying is it doesn't seem like Spain wants to stop it.

13:00.  Oh no no no no Spain does not want to stop it.

13:04.  Why does the Spanish government want this to continue it seems like a big problem.

13:08.  The Spanish government wouldn't want for it to stop because every year the Spanish government receives a huge amount of money from the European Union.  When migration stops, a huge amount of money Spain keeps getting from the European Union for migration will not have that money.  What Spain can do is that try to minimize it but not stop it completely.

13:30.  So that they keep getting the money.  

13:31.  Of course.  It is a game.  [When] money is involved, my brother.  Every year the European Union gives more than three billion euros to Spain.  Spain keeps 2 billion Spain's government will take 1 billion in suitcase put it on a flight go to Mauritania. Maybe the government spoke with like 10 people from Mauritania.  The top, from the top.  Those group of people that the government go to meet with the money is not by check; it's not by transfer; it's in carton, it's in luggage.

14:04.  Wait, what!  Wait, you're serious.

14:06.  Luggage luggage luggage it's in the luggage.

14:09.  Wait they actually bringing a suitcase of cash?

14:12.  So the suitcase on the table, that's why it's a game. 

14:14.  Wait are you serious right now? 

14:16.  We are talking something serious here, my brother.

14:19.  Whoa!  They actually paying cash?

14:20.  Of course.  In cash.  In cash, no transfer.  In cash.  In a negotiation room, maybe there were 20 officials from Mauritania.  When the Spanish government leaves, the 20 officials that were in the meeting from  Mauritania, they share the money among themselves.  

14:40.  Oh so it's all corrupt.  [The narrator/video photographer is really wearing me out with a stupid emphasis.]

14:42.  So when they share the money among themselves nothing is done. Boats keep coming.  Boats keep coming.  Boats keep coming.  Even the police here they don't want for it to stop because the Spanish police that work here, more than 250, and they are all only for migration.  And the 250 that are here, they're paid three times than the regular police. 

SAMA HOOLE: Eat a pound of beef a day, every day for a year, and one animal dies. One bullock, two years out on grass, a bolt to the forehead and gone before the sound reaches him.

Eat a pound of beef a day, every day for a year, and one animal dies. One bullock, two years out on grass, a bolt to the forehead and gone before the sound reaches him. Eat a pound of pork a day for a year and 3 pigs die. Most go down a lift into a pit of carbon dioxide. It burns the nose and throat, they fight to climb out, and it takes the best part of a minute to put them under. Eat a pound of lamb a day for a year and 8 lambs die. Stunned, cut, done inside a second. Eat a pound of salmon a day for a year and 55 fish die, plus the sardines they were fed. The lucky ones are clubbed. The rest have the gills cut while awake, or are gassed, and fight it for up to nine minutes. Eat a pound of chicken a day for a year and 75 birds die. Hung upside down by the legs on a moving line, dragged head first through an electrified bath, then the blade. Some arch their necks, miss the water, and meet the blade awake. Eat a pound of prawns a day for a year and 15,000 die. In the trawl they are crushed and left to asphyxiate on the deck. In the farm, their mother has her eyestalk cut off to make her lay. Eat a pound of bread a day for a year and nobody can give you a number. Field mice, voles and nesting birds go through the combine in July. In Germany alone the mowers cut around 90,000 roe deer fawns in half every May. Round the grain store the rats take the poison and bleed to death inside for a week. Eat a pound of rice a day for a year and the paddy is flooded, drained and sprayed, and everything in the water goes with it. Frogs, fish, snakes, the lot. Then the stubble is burned. The bullock had a number on an ear tag and a man who checked on him every morning. The field mouse had a combine.

The only animal on the list that was looked in the eye before it died is the one you have been told to feel guilty about. 

HUDSON CROZIER: A new pro-Palestinian group is on the block — every block, actually — organizing GLOBAL protests while based in London.

Anas al-Tikriti, MAB, and Friends of Al Aqsa, previously played a role in virulent anti-Israel protest during Operative Protective Edge in 2014 at the behest of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS).  --Kyle Shideler

Hudson Crozier explains that, 

DEEP DIVE: A new pro-Palestinian group is on the block — every block, actually — organizing GLOBAL protests while based in London. What if I told you several of its leaders are openly tied to Hamas, the PFLP, and the Muslim Brotherhood?

Introducing Global Alliance for Palestine: 

from Hudson Crozier's "Rampant Terrorism Ties Run Through Transnational Pro-Palestinian Protest  Group," Hudson Crozier, Washington Examiner, October 14, 2026.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

MARTIN ARMSTRONG: The UK has supplied over 80,000 drones to Zelensky, orchestrated by Boris Johnson, who has intervened to ensure Zelensky does not agree to peace.

ALEX FASULO: That's probably why there are dozens of state endangered and threatened species that rely on grasslands to survive our state's own Department of Environmental Conservation admits the number one reason all of these animals are endangered or at heightened risk of going extinct is because they don't have habitat.

Boy, it's a pretty good financial gig if you start an environmental nonprofit in New York state and do everything but protect the environment because the state will reward you with money if you prioritize climate resiliency.  We're going to look at the example of the Grassland Bird Trust which is the other Environmental non-profit on the scene here at Fort Edwards Solar, or rather they were before they took a settlement payment from the Canadian Corporation set to destroy one of the last grasslands of its kind throughout the entire Northeast.  That wasn't the only way the Grassland Bird Trust financially benefited from turning their backs on grasslands, which is quite literally in their name.  So let's look at three different ways this non-profit made money this year by allowing foreign corporations to fragment grassland habitat which they might need a reminder of this.  Grassland habitat doesn't function if it's fragmented.  That's probably why there are dozens of state endangered and threatened species that rely on grasslands to survive our state's own Department of Environmental Conservation admits the number one reason all of these animals are endangered or at heightened risk of going extinct is because they don't have habitat.  I just covered back in the fall of 2025 that our state very smartly okay I'm never saying these bureaucrats aren't smart very smartly has created Financial programs and incentives through our DEC that if these groups prioritize climate resiliency you know by clearing forests and grasslands of course they will be financially rewarded well wouldn't you know it in 2026 the grassland bird trust was just awarded $30,295 to not protect grasslands.  From a FOIA we submitted, my attorney and I we also found through the ORES custodial fund, which is intervener funds, a.k.a., managed opposition, they took home $24,897 for their attorney.  Except the Grassland Bird Trust never planned to actually challenge the final siting permit for Fort Edward Solar and at the last second folded and took money from Boralex instead. But they still got $25,000 to make it seem like they might for a split second care about those species and right before ORES issued its final siting permit to Fort Edward Solar, Grassland Bird Trust announced that they had gone into a nice partnership a financial settlement with Boralex, partnership which is now Brookfield Asset Management, an even larger multinational Canadian conglomerate that has ties to its current sitting prime minister who's actually been brought before their parliament in question about the influence he currently wields over Brookfield Asset Management.  We don't get to know how much money GBT took home from this arrangement.  I'm sure it was a pretty penny though. This is the ecosystem New York State has set up to get its tentacles into every single Environmental Group here so that they knew when it was time to clear tens of thousands of acres of protected habitat for solar and wind experiments they were counting on having no opposition in doing it.  That's why I've never accepted a single cent from New York State or one of these corporations.  Non-profit groups should not be able to triple dip into the very projects they should be standing up to.  That is how we have ended up in this situation in our state right now, that and having a commissioner appointed to the DEC by our governor, our sitting governor, to make sure that solar and wind is prioritized over the actual physical freaking environment.

SCOTT MECHKOWSKI: Abolishing ICE doesn’t make the people ICE is looking for disappear.

The mayor of the biggest city in America used his standing to try to spring a man DHS says has that record, with no footage, no investigation, and no idea what that officer was looking at. Councilmember Tiffany Cabán also called for abolishing ICE. Governor Kathy Hochul urged the White House to halt enforcement operations in New York. Not one of them had the facts. They all had the conclusion.  --Scott Mechkowski. 

I taught use of force. I know the difference between a use-of-force review and a press conference. Too many people with microphones have forgotten, and some never knew, the difference.

Austin showed how this works. On September 20, an ICE officer shot a Venezuelan man, Wilber Garcés Pérez, in North Austin. Within the hour, an Austin council member was telling reporters that an ICE vehicle had rammed his car and that the agent had fired at least five times through the back windshield. Austin’s own police chief contradicted that account on the spot. By then a crowd had formed. The mayor, Kirk Watson, was at the podium within hours, saying he wasn’t surprised, because ICE was rogue and fomenting chaos. Nobody in that room had seen the footage.

The next day, Garcés Pérez’s attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, held a press conference and went on national television with a specific story. A black truck had sideswiped his car; there were no lights, and he had no idea who was behind him. Members of Congress stood beside her and demanded answers. On X, she wrote that “we all know” the force wasn’t necessary, before anyone had seen a frame of footage.

Then the video surfaced. It showed a traffic stop before the shooting. Garcés Pérez was already stopped, two agents were at his driver’s window, and at least one unmarked SUV had its lights on. Asked by a local paper to walk through what happened, the attorney said she couldn’t confidently tell the chain of events. She had already told the country, with total confidence, that the sideswipe was how it began. Federal prosecutors allege he struck an officer with his side mirror and later tried to hit an officer with his car. He says he was looking for a safe place to pull over, and a court will decide that. The first version had a head start on every correction, and nobody has made her unsay it.

. . .

Mayor Zohran Mamdani didn’t wait. That night he stood in front of cameras and called ICE rotten to its core and said the agency must be abolished, before anyone had seen a second of video. He also spent two hours on the phone with the president of the United States and the secretary of Homeland Security trying to get Belgal released. The mayor of the biggest city in America used his standing to try to spring a man DHS says has that record, with no footage, no investigation, and no idea what that officer was looking at. Councilmember Tiffany Cabán also called for abolishing ICE. Governor Kathy Hochul urged the White House to halt enforcement operations in New York. Not one of them had the facts. They all had the conclusion. The only official who gave the public real facts that night was the police commissioner, who laid out what the cameras showed and what they didn’t. That is more than the mayor did.

Nobody following his career should be surprised. In 2020, Mamdani wrote that the NYPD was racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. He said it was an institution too wicked and corrupt to negotiate with, and he called for defunding it. He ran for mayor promising to abolish the department’s Strategic Response Group, and he still says he will. When the old posts resurfaced the week an NYPD officer was killed in a Midtown shooting, he said he wasn’t running to defund the police. The apology arrived when it started costing him votes. An apology on that schedule doesn’t erase what he said. It tells you what he believed the day before. Thursday told you what he believes now. When police work and his politics point in different directions, he knows which one he stands with, and it isn’t the one wearing the badge.  

Finish reading.

VALERIE ANNE SMITH: In 2024 there were 562 cases of vaccine-derived polio vs only 99 from the wild virus. The oral polio vaccine is now causing more paralysis than the disease it was meant to stop.

Preventive Pulse Polio. 

Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History, Suzanne Humphries, MD, and Roman Bystrianyk, 2013.  

Might be one of the reasons why you're not getting the effect from chocolate that you were looking for.

Monday, October 12, 2026

WALL STREET APES: There are even medical facilities in California, Florida and all over that pay companies for referral fees for thousands of new patients every month.

60% of homeless in Los Angeles are not from Los Angeles they're being bust in and flown in so that these companies who provide services to the homeless can profit.

These 40,000 people, 60% of them, citywatch just announced this week, are not from Los Angeles.  They're not from California. These people have been bused in by scam rehabs, scam NGOs, scam homeless nonprofits.  These people when I unplug them and say you're not taking our tax money anymore, they're all going to Seattle where the mayor there will welcome them.  These are products to a lot of people.  So the people who want to keep doing drugs and live on the sidewalk, a lot of these people are going to leave; the other ones, there's a lot of criminals.  People are getting naked in front of kids. 

This woman worked with the homeless in Maine. She’s so angry about what’s happening to her state she can’t even speak without getting mad.

She says homeless are being flown into Maine to live off the system, “It’s a lifestyle” and the homeless have no requirements to do anything. They are just handed everything for free and can go out into the public and do whatever they want during the day. 

She says in additional to the homeless being flown into Maine to live off the government, Democrats on Maine are giving them everything they need to be drug addicts. 

It’s true, the homeless are being provides for free:

     Sterile syringes, needles and injection supplies including cookers, cotton, tourniquets, etc.

     Naloxone (Narcan).

     Fentanyl and xylazine test strips so users can check their supply before injecting or using.

     “Boofing” kits which are needleless syringes, lubricant packets, saline tins and wipes for rectal administration of drugs.

     Wound care supplies.

     Safer-sex materials.

     Free ongoing methadone and Suboxone programs (The woman says these programs are being abused).

Here are documented nonprofits and programs that pay for travel for the homeless.

     Portland, Oregon’s Portland Solutions. Officials have explicitly mentioned sending people to Maine.

     San Francisco’s Homeward Bound and Journey Home programs. These are city programs that have relocated thousands of homeless people out of the city by bus or other means to destinations across the United States.

There are For-profit “human brokers” in the addiction treatment industry where they take the homeless and send them to other states to get paid for enrolling them into treatment program. There are TONS of companies getting paid to do this. 

There are even medical facilities in California, Florida and all over that pay companies for referral fees for thousands of new patients every month.

It’s a giant homeless industrial complex and it will only keep growing unless the money is cut off. 

Never forget Richmond, Virginia’s Columbus Statue, ignorantly desecrated and destroyed by far left extremists radicalized by Critical Race Theory ideology and historical revisionism in 2020. The lady pictured, Anna Gragnani, was alive during its dedication in 1927 and even helped to unveil the statue.

It was the oldest Columbus statue in the South [and] was the first monument in Richmond to have night illumination. The idea of Frank Realmuto, the statue was sculpted, erected and financed entirely by Virginians of Italian birth. The artist was Ferruccio Legnaioli. 

GREGORY K. BOVINO: The voters didn’t ask for custody transfers. They asked for mass deportations, and the numbers aren’t there. One removal per operation, a hundred agents for a single person, and the gap between the promise and the delivery keeps growing.

Tom Homan sounds frustrated, and he directs his frustration at the governor and the mayor, but he really should be looking in the mirror. He’s only deploying ICE to targeted individuals when the problem is well beyond that scope. The voters didn’t ask for custody transfers. They asked for mass deportations, and the numbers aren’t there. One removal per operation, a hundred agents for a single person, and the gap between the promise and the delivery keeps growing. That’s the real story. Not the protests, not the optics. The math.

@RealTomHoman 

Mamdani's Dismissal of Catholics: Is He Afraid of Catholics?

Why does Mamdani overlook, ignore, otherwise omit Italians from New York's or America's history?  Is it because Catholicism is the one religion that would at any moment go to war against Muslims? 

Remember this attack back in early July?   

Mamdani's "team" forgot to include historic
neighborhoods, like Little Italy, Irish and Jewish nabes but he certainly found time and room on the map for nabes like 
Little Palestine in Bay Ridge, Little Egypt in Astoria, Little Senegal, Little Pakistan, and other Middle East neighborhoods.

Little Italy, the historic one in Manhattan on Mulberry Street, Irish neighborhoods like Woodlawn in the Bronx and Woodside/Sunnyside in Queens, and Jewish neighborhoods like Borough Park Brooklyn, the Sephardi areas of South Brooklyn, and the Bukharian community in Queens--Rego Park/Forest Hills/Kew Gardens.  Mamdani left out these “New York City Immigrant Enclaves” in a map released by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs as part of a Neighborhood Passport tourism campaign tied to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It highlighted about 30 enclaves, including Little Palestine in Bay Ridge, Little Egypt in Astoria, Little Senegal, Little Pakistan, multiple Chinatowns, Little Poland, but omitted classic European-origin ones associated with groups that historically helped build the city. 

"Mayor Mamdani's Map of NYC Immigrant Neighborhoods Sparks Outrage for Ignoring Little Italy," Matthew Fischetti, Carl Campanile, ad Natalie O'Neill, NY Post, July 8, 2026. 

The Mayor’s map of New York City’s immigrant neighborhoods.

Italian: Most notably Little Italy in Lower Manhattan, Belmont in the Bronx, Bensonhurst/Dyker Heights in Brooklyn, were also omitted. Mamdani later said the map, which his team claimed was based on prior work and updated with Little Odessa, Little Senegal, Little Egypt, and Little Palestine, was not exhaustive and that Little Italy would be added.

Irish: Neighborhoods such as Woodlawn in the Bronx and Woodside, or Sunnyside, in Queens.

Jewish: Borough Park is large Orthodox community, Sephardi corridors in South Brooklyn, and Bukharian Jewish in Queens. Little Odessa, Brighton Beach, with a substantial Jewish population, often Russian/Soviet Jewish, was one of the additions noted by the administration.

MAMDANI BUILDING AN ISLAMO-MARXIST TEMPLE TO DIVERSITY, OMITS AMERICANS WHO BUILT THE CITY OVER 100 YEARS AGO: ITALIANS, IRISH, & JEWS, Thursday, July 9, 2026. 

 

SAMA HOOLE: You store vitamin B12 for three to five years. You store vitamin A for months, in the liver, like every other hunter. You store vitamin D in your own fat, to see you through a winter. You store almost no vitamin C. Scurvy takes about a month.

Your body keeps two months of fat in storage and less than one day of carbohydrate, which tells you what it was expecting to run on.

Your entire bloodstream holds about one teaspoon of sugar. Any more and an alarm goes off. Your liver and muscles hold perhaps 2,000 calories of carbohydrate. A day, if you sit still. A lean adult carries around 100,000 calories of fat. Six weeks and more, with no further instructions. You store vitamin B12 for three to five years. You store vitamin A for months, in the liver, like every other hunter. You store vitamin D in your own fat, to see you through a winter. You store almost no vitamin C. Scurvy takes about a month. Look at what gets a warehouse. Fat, and the nutrients that come in an animal. Those arrive in gluts. A kill, a feast, then nothing for a week. So the body built somewhere to keep them. Carbohydrate gets a shelf. If none turns up, the liver simply makes its own, and has done every night of your life. There are essential fats. There are essential proteins. The textbook requirement for carbohydrate is zero, and it says so. No engineer builds a 100,000 calorie tank for the reserve fuel and a one day tank for the main one. The plate they drew for you is two thirds the fuel you were never built to store.

JAIRO TOMICO: When local government refuses to enforce basic health codes, tax laws, and sidewalk safety, it isn't compassion, it's a surrender of public order.

No health inspections.  No permits.  No taxes.  Welcome to LA's illegal sidewalk economy.  Walk down any major corridor in Los Angeles and you see the exact same thing: unpermitted operations blocking public right of ways, running open grease fires on sidewalks, and dumping waste directly into storm drains.  State and city lawmakers deregulated street vending under the banner of equity.  But in reality they created a parallel, off-the-books economy with zero accountability.  Think about the brick and mortar restaurant owners down the street paying high commercial rent, property taxes, and strict health department inspection fees. They get squeezed by city inspectors for minor infractions while unpermitted operations right outside their front door operate without food safety standards, sales tax collection, or basic health oversight.  When local government refuses to enforce basic health codes, tax laws, and sidewalk safety, it isn't compassion, it's a surrender of public order.

JAIRO TOMICO.

TOM LUONGO: This is a very big deal... You don't go after a house rep in DC if you are rolling over and playing dead. This is another poke 'em in the eye, and see who's phones light up.

Rep. Ilhan Omar's DC home raided by DHS. 

2:02.  But at the same time you look at especially Japan but also the other East Asian countries.  I don't mean South Asian by the way, or fake Asia Indians.  That's a totally different animal by the way, totally different species, they're very open.  We don't want too many Muslims.  We don't want too many Somalians.  We don't want too many Africans; they just don't.  They don't want too many Indians, for sure.  They're very open about that . . . because the problem with the United States . . . every society has a baseline, their foundation, right?  The French society baseline is the fact that there was a French Revolution.  The German is obviously based on ethnicity.   And the United States is based on the Constitution, essentially saying that come with your high skills and ambition and you can have the American dream, right?  And the problem with that is that people can say that they have high class labor and skills, like these Indians, but they're bringing low class importation of culture that's not assimilable.  Absolute paganism.  Vegan, nutritionally deficient, like literally dirty, right?  Low class people.  So I don't care if they are high-class skills and laborers, which I don't even think they are, right, but let's say that they are, like for the sake of argument, it doesn't matter. It's what kind of culture are you importing into the land that you live in?  That's what I'll say.  

3:35.  And when I visit Korea people will always say will look at the population replacement level Korea is falling apart well they just turned that around turn that around recently also keep in mind that Korea didn't have like an incel problem Korea's problem wasn't necessarily that they you know Korea doesn't have a sex problem it's like when you go to New York City everyone there is hooking up but they're not having children which is a problem they're not stepping up and becoming mothers and fathers because they're extending their adolescence but it's not because they are these dysgenic people coping online politically and LARPing with memes that's what's going on in the United States and it's a shame and also eventually East Asia is also waking up to that and now their population replacement is kind of going back to its normalcy so East Asia is on the rise here and I must say people always say well why don't you go back to Asia well all my assets are tired here in conjunction to all my relationship friends everything family it's all tied here but I want the West to succeed and I know this sounds really f***** up but I trust my senses and instincts now that all the demographic data is backing it up

SAMA HOOLE: Your body is hunting equipment from the skull to the heel, and you have been using it to carry shopping. Your brain burns a fifth of your energy sitting still. Nothing that expensive gets built on leaves. It was paid for in meat and fat, and it was built to plan a kill.

Your body is hunting equipment from the skull to the heel, and you have been using it to carry shopping. Your brain burns a fifth of your energy sitting still. Nothing that expensive gets built on leaves. It was paid for in meat and fat, and it was built to plan a kill. Your eyes face forward, like every animal that chases and unlike every animal that gets chased. The whites of them are on show so the hunter beside you can follow your gaze without a word being said. You have two to four million sweat glands and no fur. You are the best-cooled animal on land. An antelope cannot pant and gallop at once. You can sweat and jog all afternoon. You have a ligament running up the back of your neck whose only job is to hold your head steady at a run. No ape has it. Your shoulder throws at ninety miles an hour. A chimp, far stronger pound for pound, manages twenty. Your backside is the largest muscle you own, and it hardly switches on until you break into a run. Your Achilles tendon is a long spring that hands back energy on every stride. A chimp barely has one. In the Kalahari, men still run a kudu to a standstill in the midday heat. It takes a few hours and the kudu loses. In mid Wales every June, people race horses over twenty-two miles of hill. People have won it three times. A brain to plan it, eyes to aim it, a cooling system, a throwing arm and a spring in each heel.

Nobody has ever needed any of that to creep up on a blackberry. 

LINUXHIPPIE: This is why it is necessary to Live Stream the execution. Harden your hearts folks, there is no way out of this but violence. They will never stop unless you stop them. Dialogue is the mechanism used to get you to not resist.

SCOTT MECHKOWSKI: I keep hearing that America is the last refuge on earth. It isn’t. Colombia hosts more refugees than any country in the world, and as of last fall, more than 1.9 million Venezuelans held temporary protection there. Mexico took in more than 70,500 asylum applications last year and recognizes over 60% of them.

from Scott Mechkowski,

One hundred thirty-five. That is how many irregular crossings the International Organization for Migration (IOM) counted in Panama’s Darién Gap in the first four months of this year, a 95% drop from the same stretch of 2025. In 2023, more than half a million people walked through that jungle.

Newsweek reported it last week. I haven’t seen anyone else pick it up.I spent more than 24 years in immigration enforcement, and for most of them I heard the same thing from the other side of the argument. People will come no matter what you do. Build a wall, they’ll find a tunnel. Add agents, they’ll find a new route. We were told the only real choice was how kindly to treat them when they arrived.

The Darién just answered that.

Let me tell you what that jungle was, because it was never what the cameras showed. It was a toll road, and the Clan del Golfo ran it. Nobody crossed without paying them. Colombia’s Defense Ministry estimated their take at about $125 a head, totaling roughly $57 million in the first 10 months of 2023. Human Rights Watch said $68 million. The most conservative estimate I found, from InSight Crime, was still north of $17 million for the transport packages alone. Pick whichever number you like. That is a cartel’s payroll, and the migrants paid it.

They paid in other ways too. The IOM counted at least 245 people missing in the Darién between 2021 and early 2024 and said the real number is higher. In 2023 alone, Doctors Without Borders treated 676 survivors of sexual violence. That is what the open route cost the people on it.

I keep hearing that America is the last refuge on earth. It isn’t. Colombia hosts more refugees than any country in the world, and as of last fall, more than 1.9 million Venezuelans held temporary protection there. Mexico took in more than 70,500 asylum applications last year and recognizes over 60% of them. Human Rights Watch (HRW), no friend of border enforcement, notes that many people crossing the Darién had already settled in South America for years. CNN recently profiled a Venezuelan woman who said she had crossed seven countries and a jungle to get here. Several of those countries take asylum claims every day.

I am not saying asylum isn’t real. I have met people who needed it, and the law protects them. But asylum was written for people fleeing persecution. It wasn’t written as the cheapest way into a better economy, and many people have figured out how to use it that way. Pay a cartel, cross the jungle, make the claim, get released, and wait. The immigration court backlog is now over 3 million cases. By the time a judge gets to your file, you have a job, a lease, and roots.

Somebody pays for that wait. I spent my career in New York City, and I can tell you what happens there when Washington doesn’t enforce the law. The city holds the bag. Mayor Adams said the cost would reach about $12 billion over three years. The city comptroller counted 340 asylum-related contracts worth an estimated $5.7 billion and found that no-bid deals were charging far more than competitive ones. The Fiscal Policy Institute argues the city’s own share is smaller than the headline. Fine. Even their number is in the billions.

Panama deserves credit for how this ended and blame for how it started. For years, its “controlled flow” program was built to move people through the country as fast as possible. HRW put the cost to migrants at about $140 each for boats and buses. Panama told HRW it spent $60 million on the program in 2022. Then José Raúl Mulino was sworn in, promised to close the Darién, and signed a migration agreement with the United States within hours. The reception camps that fed the bus line closed. U.S.-funded deportation flights started. Crossings dropped about 98%.

Mulino made that call, but he didn’t do it alone. Secretary Rubio traveled to Panama City and thanked him for the joint repatriation program, and a security agreement followed. At home, this administration is doing what the last one refused to do. It treats a hemispheric surge as an invasion that must be repelled. Border Patrol was on pace for roughly 98,000 Southwest border apprehensions this fiscal year, the lowest since 1967.

Smugglers sell one thing, and it is certainty. Pay us, cross, get released, stay. The minute that promise stops being believable, there is nothing left to sell. That is why the Darién went quiet.

Congress should stop treating this as someone else’s job. Write first-country-of-arrival agreements into law with partners that already process claims. Fund enough judges that cases are decided in months, not years. Attach real consequences to a denial. The Darién has shown what works. The only question is whether Washington will write it down before the next administration forgets it.

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Scott Mechkowski served more than 24 years in federal immigration enforcement and retired as deputy field office director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City. He is a visiting fellow for deportation studies at the Oversight Project. 

Sunday, October 11, 2026

SAMA HOOLE: Nobody ever painted a salad on a cave wall. Lascaux has around 900 animals and no side dishes.

Every time the human race has cared about a food enough to paint it, steal it or go to war over it, the food was an animal. Nobody ever painted a salad on a cave wall. Lascaux has around 900 animals and no side dishes. Nobody ever rode out at midnight to steal a neighbour's lentils. Ireland's national epic is a war over one bull. Nobody ever paid a bride price in celery. Nobody ever branded a carrot. The word itself means the mark you burn into a hide. Nobody ever dug a ditch round a park to keep the peasants off the kale. Nobody ever hanged a man for taking the king's cabbage. Nobody ever read the future in the entrails of a leek. Nobody ever killed the fatted turnip for a son come home. Nobody ever named a star sign after a bean. There is a bull, a ram and a goat up there, and they got in first. Nobody ever followed a migrating herd of spinach across a land bridge into America. For 2.6 million years the species was in no doubt about which part of dinner was the dinner.

It took a committee and a pyramid diagram to make it a matter of opinion.