Mayorkas Says Border Crisis ‘Unsustainable’ and ‘We’re Going to Lose’

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met privately with Border Patrol agents in Texas and said in leaked audio that the border crisis is “unsustainable” and “we’re going to lose” if “borders are the first line of defense.”

“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico, and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said Thursday, according to the audio obtained by Fox News’ Bill Melugin through a Border Patrol source. {snip}

{snip} He said the federal government’s system was not designed to handle such an influx of migrants as the U.S. has seen in recent months and he was “very well” aware that the sector recently came close to “breaking.”

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Mayorkas visited the Texas border and announced that agents handled more than 212,000 migrant encounters in July, marking a 13% increase from the previous month. He admitted the issue was “one of the toughest challenges we face.”

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Criticism of the Biden administration’s border policies has only sharpened due to new COVID-19 variants and what critics see as a lack of attention from Vice President Kamala Harris, who was assigned to take over the migration issue in March.

Some border agents have also seemed exasperated by the administration’s approach to the crisis.

“For those of us who have been around here long enough … we don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” one agent told Mayorkas. “We’ve had this happen before. We know exactly how to shut it down. We need to make illegal entry illegal.”

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Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is pressing for more expulsion flights into the interior of Mexico so individuals can’t just “turn around and give it another try,” and increase criminal prosecutions of recidivists, Mayorkas said.

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A CBS report on Thursday said that more than 83,000 migrant parents and children — about 88% – who were processed in July were allowed to seek asylum. The report said the Biden administration has “categorically shielded children from the policy.”

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