Mayorkas Couldn’t Be More Wrong about His Accusation that Gov. Abbott “Couldn’t Be More Wrong” about Controlling the Border
On Sunday, impeached Homeland Security Secretary appeared on CNN’s State of the Union program. During his appearance, Mayorkas took dead aim at Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who recently asserted that President Biden has all the authority he needs to secure our borders. Speaking in Eagle Pass, Texas, last week, Abbott charged that Biden is “not using his executive authority to do any of those things that Congress has already authorized,” adding he “does not need new laws.”
“Couldn’t be more wrong, couldn’t be more wrong,” Mayorkas retorted. President Biden and his administration spokespeople have repeatedly claimed that the record surge of illegal immigration is the result of a “broken immigration system” that can only be repaired by Congress, even though it was working reasonably well before he took office. Thus, the administration’s assertion is that they have no choice but to release people into the country.
Admittedly, our immigration system isn’t perfect and could benefit from some improvements. But if it is Mayorkas’ assertion that the administration does not have statutory authority to detain and remove illegal entrants, that couldn’t be more wrong. He might want to look at a report issued by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), dated Sept. 1, 2022. The first sentence of that report states, “The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) authorizes—and in some cases requires—the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to detain non-U.S. nationals (aliens) who are subject to removal from the United States.”
INA Section 235(b) requires that inadmissible aliens, whether subject to expedited removal or regular removal proceedings, be detained. This includes asylum seekers. Further, Section 236(c) of the INA requires the government to detain inadmissible aliens who have committed criminal offenses or who are inadmissible on terrorism grounds.
Nevertheless, under Secretary Mayorkas very few of the migrants who were encountered at our borders over the last three years were detained. Rather, they were processed and released into the country. Mayorkas himself admitted that more than 85 percent of migrants encountered at the southern border have been released into the U.S.
Not only is DHS, under Mayorkas, releasing millions of aliens who are subject to removal, they are not even filling all of the 34,000 detention beds that are available to them. In 2023, the average number of aliens detained on a daily basis was just 28,289. Moreover, President Biden’s FY 2024 budget proposal calls for cutting the number of detention beds to 25,000.
Detention is a powerful deterrent to illegal immigration. On the other hand, the administration’s large-scale catch-and-release policies have proven to be a powerful magnet, resulting in some 10 million illegal entries over the past three years.
Secretary Mayorkas also neglected to mention additional actions that he and the president have taken to cancel successful policies that have withstood legal scrutiny. Beginning on his first day in office, President Biden canceled the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as Remain in Mexico, which was serving as a bulwark against people crossing the border illegally and filing specious asylum claims. Likewise, the Biden administration scrapped agreements with Central American governments that required migrants to seek asylum in the first safe country they set foot in, rather than waiting until they arrived at the U.S. border to request protection. The president also halted construction of the border wall – sections of which American taxpayers had already paid for – which has been proven to effectively prevent people from crossing the border illegally in the first place.
There is work to be done by Congress, such as overriding legal settlements that encourage the migration of unaccompanied minors and families with children, and amending statutes that were supposed to fight human trafficking, but instead encourage it. Instead, the president and his administration have spent the past three years demanding amnesty for illegal aliens already here, and changes to the law that would result in huge increases in legal immigration.
Congress has failed to yield to those demands. In response, the administration has simply refused to enforce existing laws while claiming, lamely, that they lack the authority to do so – a claim that “couldn’t be more wrong.”