Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took a victory lap Thursday over the dropping number of illegal immigrants trying to sneak across the southern border, saying it’s evidence that his carrot-and-stick approach is paying off.
He said a combination of building new “pathways” for unauthorized migrants to reach the U.S., threatening “consequences” on those that still come outside of those pathways, and higher standards to discourage bogus asylum claims have tamped down on the numbers.
The result, he said, has been a 65% drop in “border encounters.”
“We are meeting people where they are,” Mr. Mayorkas said at the Aspen Security Forum.
While the new pathways he has created face legal questions, Mr. Mayorkas said they were the key to giving migrants some hope of reaching the U.S. and discouraging them from paying smugglers to bring them across illegally.
He said it’s tough to discourage a mother who is sending a juvenile girl to the U.S. because it’s dangerous for the child to walk to school in their neighborhood.
Given the current system, he suggested, the best alternative is to try to siphon them away from smugglers, who can charge $10,000 or more per person, and who have been blamed for record numbers of migrant deaths over the last two years.
“Our hope is that our model of incentivizing people to apply for relief before they take the journey and delivering a consequence regime if they don’t avail themselves of those pathways works and keeps a cap, if you will, on the number of people we encounter under very dangerous circumstances,” Mr. Mayorkas said.
The carrot-and-stick approach is still being developed but over the last two months, the dynamic of illegal immigration has shifted dramatically.
The Border Patrol, which nabs people who try to sneak in between official crossings, said its arrests along the U.S.-Mexico boundary dropped from nearly 184,000 in April to fewer than 100,000 in June. Meanwhile, officers at the ports of entry along the southern border saw encounters rise from about 28,000 in April to 45,000 in June.
Tens of thousands more are flying into airports inside the U.S. under “parole” programs Mr. Mayorkas created for Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Ukrainians.
Critics point out that those migrants coming through the ports of entry are still here without a legal visa. The only difference is that they scheduled an arrival to meet Mr. Mayorkas’s new framework.
Mr. Mayorkas’s remarks come as the GOP-controlled House ponders impeachment proceedings against him.
On Wednesday, the Homeland Security Committee released a report accusing Mr. Mayorkas of “dereliction of duty.” The report cataloged at least a dozen laws or court orders the secretary has flouted, as well as two dozen “lies to Congress” and more than 50 “lies to the American people.”
Other Republicans point to ongoing dangers from the immigration crisis, including a record number of terrorism suspects being encountered sneaking across the border from Mexico and record flows of fentanyl being detected.
“If this is what the Biden administration calls a plan that’s ‘working as intended,’ I’d hate to see what they think failure looks like,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican.
Mr. Mayorkas has overseen the worst border chaos in history, with Customs and Border Protection recording 2.8 million encounters with unauthorized migrants in 2022 and 2.3 million over the first nine months of fiscal year 2023.
The Congressional Budget Office said at least 1.5 million of those had been caught and released under Mr. Mayorkas’s “parole” authority between Oct. 1, 2021, and April 2023. The Center for Immigration Studies says the total number of catch-and-release migrants is more than 2 million.
Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged the immigration system is broken and people are taking advantage of the asylum system. But he bristled at the notion migrants are gaming the system.
That’s when he raised the idea of the young girl who can’t walk safely to school and whose mother sends her on the journey north.
“That speaks to the level of desperation,” he said. “That daughter may not be fleeing persecution … but at the same time she’s not gaming the system.”
Mr. Mayorkas was interviewed at the forum by Fareed Zakaria, who works for CNN and who repeatedly sought to blame Republicans for the chaos in the immigration system.
“Let me put it bluntly: Do you think that Republicans in Congress want to solve this problem or want to keep it alive because it works very well as election politics for them?” he prodded the secretary.
Mr. Mayorkas let Mr. Zakaria’s words carry the day, saying, “I’ve heard that opinion expressed.”
The secretary did, though, make a point of saying how important words are.
He highlighted his early directive to forbid the use of words such as “illegal” and “alien” and his order that all migrants, whether they came legally or not, be grouped under the term “noncitizens.”
“We would not use the term illegal alien when speaking of these individuals, we would use the term noncitizen. And that speaks to the importance of respecting the dignity of the individual,” Mr. Mayorkas said.
Source:Washington Times
