By Jacob Rueda
The situation at the southern border with Mexico is in a state of tumult. On October 5th, the Biden Administration announced it would start deporting migrants from Venezuela that crossed the border into the United States illegally. That decision is in contrast to a decision made in September where almost 500,000 Venezuelans would be given the opportunity to work legally in the U.S.
Certain online outlets are making claims about the situation at the border which differ from accounts made by official sources. One of the claims involves the use of debit cards issued to migrants on their way to the U.S.
The claim being made is that the United Nation's International Office of Migration (IOM) is handing out $800 a month debit cards to migrants. The claim is being made by an organization called the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Similar claims have been made in the past from the Gateway Pundit and Texas Congressman Lance Gooden.
According to Agence France Presse (AFP) Fact Check, the claim made by Gateway Pundit was based on tweets from a man named Todd Bensman, who is a journalist and book author who writes for the CIS. He has also made appearance on conservative talk shows and is critical of the Biden Administration's border policy.
Another of Bensman's claims is that U.S. government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, along with the U.N., are "enticing" migrants to come to the United States with these debit cards.
AFP's investigation found that while the IOM does provide aid to migrants, it does not provide them with debit cards. IOM spokesperson Alberto Cabezas Talavero told AFP the IOM provides e-wallets to migrants, not debit cards. He also said families are provided with roughly $395 "depending on family size," not $800 as Bensman claimed in his tweets.
Miguel Gonzalez with Casa Migrante, a migrant center in Reynosa Mexico who works in partnership with the IOM, told AFP the e-wallets are only meant as a temporary measure and can only be used in Mexico, not the United States.
"They do not serve as an incentive to cross the border illegally -- in fact the opposite. They make it easier for migrants to get by here in Mexico," Gonzalez said.
Politifact has fact checked a number of claims made by The Gateway Pundit, of which most of them turned out to be false. They have also been fact-checked by FactCheck.Org, and Newsguard, among others, with all of them finding The Gateway Pundit to be a misleading and factually incorrect information outlet.
The CIS openly advocates for low immigration into the United States. The organization, which claims to be independent and non-partisan among other things, was founded by John Tanton in 1985. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Tanton, who died in 2019, is a "retired Michigan ophthalmologist" who had "white nationalist beliefs" and wrote that "to maintain American culture, 'a European-American majority' is required."
The organization has also been documented to have had financial ties with other anti-immigrant individuals like Cordelia Scaife May, a wealthy heiress who was reported to believe there was an overpopulation problem and that the way to solve it was to keep immigrants out of the United States.
Other information regarding CIS can be found here.
There are currently no indications or reports of Venezuelan migrants being in possession of, or ever having had, e-wallets or anything resembling them.
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