On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson stated that smugglers and migrants “have now figured out” that the policies that the Biden administration put in place in May when Title 42 ended “are not able to handle these numbers. And so, they’re working around this system again.” Johnson also stated that he is concerned that the number of migrants at the border will increase and said that “March, April tend to be the peak months. If we’re seeing these kinds of numbers in September, October, I think we’re in for a real mess.”
Johnson said the federal government needs to provide more money to cities dealing with the surge of migrants and “It was a good thing that the Department of Homeland Security — my old department — decided to grant TPS to about 9,500 Venezuelans here in the city. That will expedite their ability to get jobs sooner and faster. But that’s really just a drop in the bucket.”
He continued, “This problem has no end in sight. And the two most alarming statistics I heard over the weekend, 8,900 apprehensions on our southern border in one day last week, and that, on the Mexican border with Central America, South Americans are now exceeding Central Americans in terms of the migration north. This is a hemispheric problem. And you have a hemispheric shift moving northward right now. The federal government needs to be all hands on deck. And that includes the State Department. The State Department, to be blunt, does not pay enough attention to this hemisphere. They leave it to the secretary of homeland security to deal with Mexico, to deal with Canada, to deal with Central America. It was Vice President Biden when he was with President Biden [sic], who dealt with Central America. This needs to be an all-hands-on-deck issue for the federal government. And in purely political terms, you want to maximize Donald Trump’s chance of re-election? Fail to deal with this problem. This will turn our politics upside down.”
Johnson added, “More fundamentally, the lesson I learned in this job when I had it was, you can do things to enhance enforcement policy or be lax on enforcement policy, that will have a very sharp effect, almost immediately, on the numbers. But so long as the underlying push factors in Central America and South America persist, the numbers are always going to lapse back to their longer-term trend lines. So, the administration got a break in May. Everyone was expecting large numbers after the end of Title 42, but they emphasized there was a right way and a wrong way to come to this country, have Venezuelans apply in a proper way, use the app, go to regional processing centers. And the migrants and the smugglers have now figured out that those things do not — are not able to handle these numbers. And so, they’re working around this system again. And so, I’m worried that these numbers are going to get higher and higher. March, April tend to be the peak months. If we’re seeing these kinds of numbers in September, October, I think we’re in for a real mess.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
