On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas argued that the Biden administration “took action” to help secure the border “a long time ago” and have “been enforcing the law from day one,” but sometimes policies take time to have an impact.
While discussing the Senate immigration bill, host Neil Cavuto asked, “Alright, but the President’s doing a lot of things that are in this measure already, and a lot of people criticize him for doing that, what took you so long? Including this measure to shut down the border once there are 4,000 crossings a day, some of these other things to speed up asylum adjudication and try to get it done in 180 days rather than waiting for years, stuff that President Biden could have done all along but didn’t, doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
Mayorkas responded, “Neil, we took action a long time ago. And migration is a very dynamic phenomenon and we are seeing the results, that take time to take hold. We built capabilities in foreign countries, in Guatemala, in Costa Rica, in Mexico as well. And sometimes, they don’t develop overnight, they take time to mature, and we’ll continue to take actions within the confines of our authorities. We need Congress to act.”
Cavuto then asked, “But I guess it struck a lot of people as odd — no disrespect, Secretary, Chad Wolf, your predecessor, was among those saying, we’re almost three and a half years into a crisis, and only now are they starting to take these executive actions, these are actions that we had been pleading with the administration to take for two and a half to three years. What do you say to that?”
Mayorkas answered, “That’s not accurate. That’s what I say. We implemented the asylum officer rule through regulation. We implemented the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule through regulation. We have built additional facilities, deployed enforcement and removal operations officers. This year, we have removed or returned more than 720,000 people who do not qualify for relief under the law, more than any full fiscal year since 2011. We’ve been enforcing the law from day one, despite the political rhetoric that suggests otherwise.”
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