Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was confronted over the timing of President Joe Biden‘s executive order that bars migrants from seeking asylum when the number of illegal migrant apprehensions exceeds 2,500 per day.
Mayorkas was pressed during an interview on ABC News’s This Week by host Martha Raddatz, who asked why the administration waited months after a bipartisan deal in the Senate to address the border crisis failed.
“We had that bipartisan deal, but it’s been four months since then, and you just now decided to take this action,” Raddatz stated.
“The bipartisan deal was rejected once,” Mayorkas said. “We pressed forward again. It was rejected a second time. And then we developed this and have implemented it and we are at an early stage.”
He continued, “And let’s not minimize the significance of this move and the significance of operationalizing it. And it requires the cooperation of other countries which we have secured.”
Raddatz also asked Mayorkas if he expected illegal immigration to drop in the coming months, as Biden’s order will stay in place until the rolling 14-day average falls below 1,500, which Raddatz pointed out has not happened under the Biden administration.
Mayorkas said that the goal of the administration was to change the “risk calculus” of those coming over the border with the ban, something Raddatz was openly skeptical about. She replayed an interview from three years ago with Mayorkas, during which he expressed confidence that the Department of Homeland Security would “accomplish our mission” on the southern border.
“That was three years ago. Since then, 6.5 million migrants have been apprehended along the southern border. It would be very hard to call that a success,” she said.
Mayorkas responded by saying that immigration is a “dynamic phenomenon” that the DHS couldn’t fully control, and shifting blame to Congress.
“Let’s recall what everyone expected when Title 42 was lifted in May of 2023. People expected pandemonium. Our model worked. We drove the numbers down,” he said. “They go down, they go up. What we need? What we need is congressional action. We cannot resource the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, the Department of Justice with additional personnel. We need Congress to legislate.”
Rabbatz also asked Mayorkas about criticisms from the left about Biden’s asylum ban, mentioning the lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, and comparing it to former President Donald Trump‘s policies.
“Martha, well, we’ve talked about that, and Congress needs to act. And in the wake of congressional action, this is the step that we take, and it’s not the first step that we’ve taken, but I respectfully disagree with the ACLU. I anticipate they will sue us. We stand by the legality of what we have done. We stand by the value proposition,” he said, adding that they had a “humanitarian obligation” to protect migrants from human smugglers.
“How does this actually do that?” Rabbatz retorted skeptically. “I mean, that’s obviously something you’ve been trying to do for a long time.”
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Mayorkas pointed to other policies meant to “maintain the integrity of the asylum process,” such as increasing the number of refugees from the Western Hemisphere.
Mayorkas was impeached by House Republicans earlier this year for his role in the handling of the southern border. He was the first Cabinet member to be impeached in nearly 150 years.