'The door is open!' TODD BENSMAN's eye witness report of a Mexican border town ... trends now
Armed only with hand-held radios, four uniformed Mexican immigration officers didn't hear the pounding footsteps until it was too late. They were going to be overrun.
A charging, screaming crowd of migrants, some carrying young children in their arms, stampeded down the bank of the Rio Grande River just outside of Matamoros, Mexico.
I watched as the immigration officers tried to hold back the mob, but it was pointless. When force failed, they tried reason.
'Please, the babies! The children! You're going to hurt the children!' an officer shouted in Spanish. 'The children could drown! Stop! Please stop what you're doing!'
Regardless, women with little ones and men with older children on their shoulders rushed into the river that marks the U.S. Mexico border.
They're headed north for Brownsville, Texas.
And as the clocks ticks down to the expiration of Title 42, the policy that permits U.S. Border Patrol to quickly deport illegal border crossers, and before new rules go into effect, these migrants decided they couldn't wait any longer.
I came to Matamoros to speak to some of the thousands of migrants who've rushed here in recent days and weeks.
Why have they come? Haven't they heard from the Biden Administration that 'the border is closed'?
According to the White House, after Title 42 ends, the U.S. will start enforcing another policy that's long been on the books, called Title 8.
Armed only with hand-held radios, four uniformed Mexican immigration officers didn't hear the pounding footsteps until it was too late. They were going to be overrun.
A charging, screaming crowd of migrants, some carrying young children in their arms, stampeded down the bank of the Rio Grande River just outside of Matamoros, Mexico.
'Please, the babies! The children! You're going to hurt the children!' an officer shouted in Spanish. 'The children could drown! Stop! Please stop what you're doing!'
Under this rule, any migrant who illegally enters the U.S. and applies for asylum, without first seeking asylum in another country, will be deported, and potentially banned from the U.S. for 5-years.
As far as I know, I'm the only American journalist on the ground here.
And since upriver in Reynosa there are running gunbattles of waring Mexican cartel factions – this mid-sized, northeast Mexican metropolis, just miles from the Gulf, seemed a good place to start.
As many as 10,000 US-bound immigrants have arrived, swelling the city's population of 520,000, and more are showing up at the city bus station by the minute.
Many migrants walked off the buses with big smiles. They're so confident in their odds of getting into the U.S. that many of them don't even bother making camp. They're heading straight over.
One thing is clear – they don't think the border is 'closed.'
'Do you guys know people they (the Americans) let in'? I asked four young Venezuelan men who'd just arrived by bus and headed straight to a riverbank queue for their turn to jump in.
'Si,' they all instantly answered in unison, nodding heads.
Tell me about them, I asked. 'A lot of people,' one said. 'Family members.'
'I have two cousins they let in,' one man elaborated.
Another offered that he had a cousin who'd crossed the river here a few days earlier, showing me the hotel name and address in Pidgeon Forge, Tennessee.
A woman holding a young napping child chimed in: 'My mom. She's in.'
As many as 10,000 US-bound immigrants have arrived, swelling the city's population of 520,000, and more are showing up at the city bus station by the minute.
