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.”
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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!”
Mayoorkas responded by saying the GOP rejected his requests for additional funds, adding:
We then turned to the bipartisan negotiations, which proved successful, which were then killed [in February 2024]. The result of it, a really terrific solution was killed by irresponsible politics. Looking back now in hindsight, in 2020 if we had known that irresponsible politics would have killed what was clearly a meritorious effort and a meritorious result, perhaps we would have taken executive action more rapidly [emphasis added].
But his comments acknowledge that he could have — but did not take “executive action more rapidly”
Mayorkas did not say he used his migrant welcome to jam the GOP into signing the Senate bill — even as he repeatedly portrayed his migration bill as the fix for his easy migration policy. But his bill would have allowed Mayorkas to claim tightened border security while also massively accelerating the inflow of newly llegal migrants for many years.
“It was the bill’s own deep, deep flaws that killed it,” said Mehlman, adding:
It was not an immigration enforcement bill. It was a complete subterfuge [because] it basically codified what was going on already. Everything [Mayorkas had done] would have been legal at that point, so it still would have had the same deleterious effects on the American people, and that’s why it was killed
Mayorkas’ Strategy
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.”
Since the election defeat, Mayorkas “is trying to make sure that, you know, he doesn’t take the blame” for the immigraiton policy that helped defeat Harris, said Mehlman:
He’s saying, “I tried, you know, the Republicans wouldn’t work with me, that, you know that that was the cause of it!” You always see this going on at the end of administrations where everybody’s concerned about their legacy. He’s no different. Obviously, he wants somebody else to take the blame when he was the Secretary of Homeland Security he was the architect of the policy. He did answer to the President … but Mayorkas certainly was the architect of this crisis.
Mayorkas is a zealous, pro-migration progress who has allied himself with like-minded investors at Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby group.
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He repeatedly explained that he supports more migration because of his sympathy for migrants, and his support for “equity” between Americans and foreigners.
He also justified his welcome for migrants by saying his priorities are above the law.
He explained his personal motivation in a May 22 graduation speech to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy:
My drive has been defined by a very clear purpose. My mother’s and father’s life journeys were defined by displacement. My mother was twice a refugee, first from war-torn Europe and, 19 years later, with my father, my sister, and me from the communist takeover of Cuba. My mother lost most of her family to the Nazi concentration camps, and she never really regained her sense of security. In Cuba, my father lost the business he had started, as well as the chance to be by his mother’s side when she passed. My parents were both extraordinary people – principled and kind beyond measure. They instilled in me the values by which they lived unflinchingly … They are the primary engine of my drive, and the primary reason why I work so hard, my purpose.
He also claims that the “needs” of U.S. business are paramount — regardless of the cost to ordinary Americans, the impact on U.S. children, or Americans’ rational opposition.
History “shows an energized and committed minority often carries the day over a passive majority,” said Mehlman.
