Border Czar Mayorkas Admits He Could Have Blocked Migration Flood

Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas said Sunday that he and his deputies could have blocked more migrants at the southern border.

“We would have taken executive action more rapidly,” if he had known in 2020 [emphasis added] that the Republicans would reject his January 2024 border bill, Mayorkas told CBS News on December 22.

“This was not incompetence,” countered Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration reform.

‘This was a deliberate plan to remake the country through immigration … [and] they were trying to create a [political] situation where they thought they could force the Republicans to capitulate and basically codify open borders,” said Mehlman.

“They opened the borders because they wanted to flood the country,” responded Rosemary Jenks, the co-founder of the Immigration Accountability Project. But, she added, “I have no evidence that anyone at DHS, including Mayorkas, was [used the migration to] pressuring Republicans in the Senate to do anything until the end of 2023,” said Jenks, adding:

I think they saw an [Senate] opportunity at the end of 2023 and thought, “Oh, hey, you know, regardless of what we do in the elections, maybe we can tie the next administration’s hands with these dumb Republicans in the Senate.”

Regardless of Mayorkas’ intentions, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump in November 2024.

The defeat has kicked off a round of fingerpointing among Democrats. Various pro-migration advocates are blaming a Latino pollster, or dissatisfaction with the economy, or grassroots activists, or bad “messaging” by Democrats.

“That’s an internal battle that the Democrats are going to have to fight out amongst themselves,” Mehlman said, adding: “The issue for the country is how do we undo the damage that has been done over the past four years and prevent it from happening again.”

Mayorkas welcomed roughly 9 million inadmissable migrants, plus several million legal migrants and temporary workers.

Mayorkas’ admission came when CBS host Margaret Brennan asked him why he allowed three years of mass migration before adopting tighter policies — including a border deal with Mexico’s government — just before the 2024 election: “Why wait until five months before the U.S. election to put in place those asylum restrictions that did cut off the [migrant] flow? That ended the crisis!”

{snip}

Mayorkas “is not crazy, he’s just ideologically driven,’ said Mehlman. “He has for the past four years carried out these progressive [pro-migration] policies, and nobody was there [in the White House or Congress] to say, “Stop!’”

The is growing evidence that President Joe Biden’s age-related decline made it difficult for him to keep his appointees under. control. For example, the evidence suggests that Biden gave up fighting against Mayorkas in March 2021 when Kamala Harris accepted and then refused Biden’s request that she become his “border czar.”

{snip}