The current secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, this week addressed what he calls the “situation” on our southern border. Since the Biden bunch are loathe to call it a crisis, hereafter that crisis will be referred to as the Situation.
The Situation has drawn a lot of attention to and considerable flak for the immigration policy of the newly hatched Biden administration. There are, for example, the record February arrests of 100,000 (up almost 30 percent from January’s 78,000). . . the more than 400 Unaccompanied Children (UACs) apprehended every day. . . the thousands of UACs kept beyond the 72-hour legal limit in border facilities. . . the untold thousands of migrants admitted without COVID testing. . . and so on.
It’s the sort of thing to make a newly minted DHS secretary issue an official Statement, which Mayorkas did on March 16.
In it, he provides a point-by-point defense of his department’s and the Biden administration’s handling of the Situation, calling reports of an incipient open-border policy nothing but calumny. After all, he insists, Biden’s bunch are expelling folks left and right. Individual adults are being shipped under CDC Title 42 protocols right back to Mexico or given plane tickets to wherever. Likewise, families are straightaway getting the bum’s rush south. Unescorted kiddies (UACs) are being lovingly cared for and not kept in what used to be called cages a minute longer than necessary. And while he admits that the Situation is difficult and “we have more work to do,” he closes with a rhetorical flourish, proclaiming, “We can do this”!
All this prompted Ken Cuccinelli, who held Mayorkas’s job during the previous administration, to issue his own comments, in an article on Center for the National Interest website, co-written by the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Howell.
Cuccinelli disputes Mayorkas’s claims that “most single adults and families” are being returned to Mexico, quoting the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff, who tweeted on March 15: “It’s no longer true that ‘most’ families are being expelled under Title 42. Stats from a one-day snapshot I saw last week showed about 25 percent of families were processed under Title 42.”
Furthermore, he questions Mayorkas’s insistence that the expulsions of single adults does not pose an “operational challenge” for the Border Patrol. Apprehending 4,500 to 6,000 single adults a day indeed does present such a challenge, as the agents themselves attest.
Cuccinelli then addresses the core of Mayorkas’s defense, which is always at the core of all migrant-friendly arguments: what the late Rush Limbaugh called “the chirren.”
Mayorkas uses the word “children” no fewer than 35 times in his statement and even goes out of his way to imply that most of the UACs are “six- and seven-year-olds.” They are not, as Cuccinelli says and as we have reported here. Most are in fact late teenagers ages 15 to 17, bound for jobs somewhere in America and forever exempt from all those pesky immigration laws.
Cuccinelli also calls into question his predecessor’s insinuation that the sudden influx of illegal migrants has been propelled by “poverty, high levels of violence, and corruption” in the home countries, in other words, Push not Pull. He writes:
The fact of the matter is, this crisis is driven by political and policy “pull factors” from the United States. The biggest of all is the message that the Biden campaign, transition team, and now the administration has sent regarding shutting down enforcement and mass amnesty.
Cuccinelli notes that the “actions” taken by the administration so proudly pointed to by Mayorkas are in fact “a series of shallow symptom-management measures that do nothing to address the root cause of the problem.” He confesses surprise, however, by Mayorkas’s announcement that the Central American Minors program of the Obama era will be restarted. That program, which was discontinued by Trump, actually involves the U.S. government taking over the role of smuggler, by flying alien children into the U.S. who are not eligible to legally immigrate. That way, as Mayorkas explains, the children are provided “a lawful pathway to come to the United States without having to take the dangerous journey.”
That’s one way to stop illegal smuggling. Take that, coyotes!
As Ken Cuccinelli concludes:
The Mayorkas statement is political propaganda. It is meant to rehabilitate deteriorating public confidence in the Biden administration’s mishandling of the border crisis. Certainly many in the media and on Capitol Hill will parrot its falsehoods. But the fact remains that what is happening on the southern border is a crisis and not a “situation.” It is Biden-made and created for political purposes. Only action will solve it, which means preventing illegal immigration, not encouraging, and processing it even faster.
For more, see the Center for the National Interest website. You can find the Mayorkas statement here.