Republican senators unleashed months of pent-up frustrations at the Biden administration’s top border official during a committee hearing that the conservative members focused entirely on the border crisis.
The 10 Republicans present Tuesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing for the Department of Homeland Security went after Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and pointedly attacked his leadership of the 250,000-person department.
“The people determining our border policy — in your opinion, are they just incompetent, or do they believe in open borders?” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana asked.
The top Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, faulted Mayorkas and other Biden administration officials for rescinding Trump administration policies.
The Biden administration terminated all previously funded border wall contracts, has restricted the illegal immigrants whom ICE may arrest within the United States, ended a program that required asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico and not be released into the U.S., and rescinded asylum agreements with other countries. The result, Grassley said, is the wave of noncitizens coming across the border this year.
“When you’re running DHS like it’s an ‘Abolish ICE’ fan club, you shouldn’t be surprised when you have an immigration crisis on your hands,” Grassley said. “When you allow the ACLU and open-borders immigration activists rather than career law enforcement professionals to dictate the terms of your immigration and border policies, then you shouldn’t be surprised when record-shattering numbers of people start showing up at the borders to take advantage of that situation.”
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Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked Mayorkas to give himself a letter grade for how he has managed the department. Mayorkas said he had earned an “‘A’ for effort, investment in mission, and support of our workforce.”
But Sen. Mike Lee of Utah disagreed with Mayorkas’s self-evaluation.
“The Department of Homeland Security has clearly failed in its mission to maintain operational control of its borders,” Lee said. “Over 2 million people have likely crossed our southern border illegally this year, with no end in sight. … You’ve got to fix this. Fix it or step down.”
Graham pushed Mayorkas to disclose the whereabouts of the 1.7 million people who have been encountered at the southern border over the past year. Mayorkas said 965,000 were expelled back across the border, but only 40,000 were flown to their home country. Approximately 125,000 children who arrived from countries other than Mexico were transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, which placed them with adults in the U.S.
“I would estimate approximately 375,000 are still here,” Mayorkas said. “That is my best estimate.”
Graham, who pulled out a whiteboard to list the various populations of migrants, said 230,000 people were still unaccounted for beyond the 375,000 releases nationwide.
“About half the people who came are still here — 40%. And that’s unacceptable. And people know throughout the world that if you come here, you got a 1-in-3 chance of never leaving. That’s got to change,” Graham said.
Other lawmakers berated Mayorkas for holding migrants, including children, in the same chain link-fenced rooms that Democrats lambasted the Trump administration for holding people in years earlier. When questioned at one point by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Mayorkas said he was “not familiar with the term ‘cages,’” later adding that tent facilities erected during the Biden administration “are not cages.” Cruz flashed a large printout of a picture that he took of the migrant processing facility in Donna, Texas, where people were crammed into fenced-in rooms and sleeping on the ground.
Cruz asked if Mayorkas knew how many people had unlawfully come across the southern border and evaded arrest this year, as well as the number of people who died while traveling to the border, the number of children trafficked against their will, or the number of women sexually assaulted by their smugglers. Mayorkas said he did not know those numbers.
“It’s been reported the Biden administration is considering paying illegal immigrants whose families were separated $450,000 apiece. That would mean for a family of four, they would get $1.8 million,” Cruz said.
Mayorkas said Cruz’s dollar amount was inaccurate and based on media reports and that the $450,000 was per family, not per person. Cruz clarified the compensation being discussed was in fact for $450,000 per person.
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“That is not what has been publicly reported. It is per person,” Cruz said. “If we pay millions of dollars to illegal immigrants, in your professional judgment, will we get more illegal immigration or less illegal immigration?”
Mayorkas declined to answer the question.
