President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, is best known for overseeing the implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals during his time in the Obama administration.
Mayorkas, 61, was described by a former DHS official as a “centrist,” but compared to the Trump White House’s immigration policies, Mayorkas’s strategies have sided with immigrants of various backgrounds, while President Trump’s policies have clenched down against many forms of legal and illegal immigration.
Mayorkas was tasked with carrying out the executive branch’s DACA memo within 60 days so that illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children could apply for two-year reprieves from deportation and receive the ability to work in the country. More than 800,000 recipients have flowed through the program since its 2012 inception.
In 2017, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the program was being gutted. He called on Congress to create a law to codify the program on the basis that Obama’s action violated the law. Sessions argued that this type of immigration decision must be set by Congress, not the White House. The program has been in limbo for several years due to DHS’s attempts to block recipients from renewing their protections.
Mayorkas, the deputy secretary in Obama’s second term, told PBS in 2017 that the “ideal solution would, in fact, be the passage of legislation along the lines of the DREAM Act that has been pending over and over again throughout the years that would give them a more permanent solution to their presence here in the United States.” He said the policy ought to be expanded to allow more people to be protected, and Biden has vowed to reinstate DACA by late April.
Mayorkas is a Cuban immigrant who was brought to the U.S. by his refugee parents as a baby. During his eight years as a DHS official in the Obama administration, the annual cap on refugee admittances ranged from 70,000 to 90,000. Under Trump, the yearly limit dropped to between 18,000 and 55,000 per year.
While refugees seek U.S. permission to relocate while still in their country of origin, asylum seekers migrate to the U.S. and seek permission to live here despite not having sought help before leaving their home country. Mayorkas wrote in a Univision op-ed ahead of this past election that Trump’s policies had led to deportations of Cubans seeking asylum at the southern border and Venezuelans who were granted temporary protected status from deportation due to unstable conditions in the South American country.
“Joe Biden has said that, as president, he will swiftly reverse Trump’s policies that have inflicted harm on Cubans, Venezuelans, and many others,” he wrote. “His leadership will bring relief to so many who are suffering from the current inhumane immigration policies that have torn lives and families apart, and allow Cuban Americans to support their families once more. The power of democracy will return in full force visa seekers excluded from Trump administration programs, as well as migrants in foreign countries who want to seek asylum.”
Mayorkas oversaw from 2009 to 2013 the federal agency responsible for legal immigration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. He created and implemented a program to provide residency in the U.S. for wealthy foreign investors who agreed to create jobs here. A DHS inspector general report in 2015 alleged his involvement in approving petitions for former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Virginia Democrat, and others looked suspicious.
Mayorkas reformed USCIS, changing its structure and focusing on fraud detection among applicants. He created the agency’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate to ensure applicants were properly vetted and not bestowed visas or work documents that they were not entitled to. The focus on fraud has also been a leading priority among Trump appointees at USCIS, who launched numerous efforts to protect Americans by implementing policies to mitigate fraud.
