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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted “in retrospect” that executive action could have been taken to counter the “irresponsible policy” that killed bipartisan border negotiations.
CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan pressed Mayorka on Sunday about why President Biden waited just five months before the election to finally make executive orders stop the flow at the border.
Mayorkas insisted that the administration had pressured Congress to act on the border, continuing to blame politics for preventing passage of border funding.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended the administration’s border actions Sunday on “Face the Nation.” (CBS News screenshot)
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“Remember where we were when the president took office,” Mayorkas said. “We were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The previous administration imposed Title 42, which is the public health authority, and it allowed us to deport individuals, to continue to deport individuals at the border as the previous administration did. There was tremendous pressure to maintain Title 42 operation, which we managed to maintain until May 2023.”
He continued, “Then we went to Congress and asked for additional funding that was desperately needed to make our administration of a broken immigration system work much better. We were denied. We went back to Congress a second time and asked for additional funding. It was denied. Then they turned around. bipartisan negotiations, which were then killed by irresponsible politics.”
A bipartisan border bill failed to advance in the Senate earlier this year. (Justin Hamel/Getty Images)
“Bilateral negotiations” referred to a Senate Border Bill negotiated by Republican Sen. James Lankford, Okla., and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, Connecticut, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, Ariz. Although the White House largely blamed Republicans for blocking passage of the bill, the bill failed to advance in the Senate by a 43-50 vote with bipartisan opposition.
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“Looking back now, in 2020, if we had known that irresponsible policy would have killed what was clearly a worthy effort and a worthy result, we might have taken enforcement action sooner,” Mayorkas said.
Mayorkas testified that the border was secure despite record crossings. (AP/Mark Schiefelbein)
Still in April 2023. Mayorkas insisted the border was “secure”, despite the record number of border crossings during the Biden administration. It was a claim he repeated despite the scorn and derision of Republicans.
