President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is admitting that migrants arriving at the southern border often “try to game” the nation’s asylum system so they can be released into the United States.
Mayorkas made the admission in an interview with CBS News. It is significant, as Biden and Mayorkas have long sought to downplay the national security, economic, and social implications of massive waves of illegal immigration to the U.S.
CBS News reports:
In an interview with CBS News, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said some migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border are trying to “game” the U.S. asylum system, echoing a statement often made by Republicans but rarely expressed by Biden administration officials. [Emphasis added]
“The reality is that some people do indeed try to game the system,” Mayorkas told CBS News in El Paso last Thursday. “That does not speak to everyone whom we encounter, but there is an element of it, and we deal with it accordingly.” [Emphasis added]
Mayorkas made the comment in response to a question about concerns some Americans have expressed about the situation at the southern border, where U.S. officials have reported record levels of migrant apprehensions over the past three years. Immigration has become one of President Biden’s worst-polling issues, as well as a top concern for voters heading into November’s presidential election. [Emphasis added]
Despite the admission, Biden’s DHS continues to release tens of thousands of migrants into the U.S. interior every few weeks — particularly through a parole pipeline. Since January 2023, that pipeline has welcomed more than a million migrants to American communities.
In total, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report from January found that in about three years, DHS has welcomed some 6.2 million migrants to the U.S. through its expansive Catch and Release network at the southern border.
At the same time, DHS will reportedly begin this summer issuing photo identification cards to migrants released into the U.S. interior while migrant encounters on Biden’s watch will top 10 million before the end of Fiscal Year 2024 — a record never seen before in American history.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
