Sen. Mitt Romney tore into President Joe Biden’s head of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his indifference in answering lawmakers’ questions about resolving the worsening border crisis, calling the secretary’s attitude “extremely damning.”
“What I find astonishing, Mr. Chairman, is that we have the secretary responsible for securing our border and our immigration system who doesn’t recognize these charts as being a problem. And there are human beings behind these numbers. And [he] is not saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to make some changes immediately.’ I find that extraordinary and extremely damning,” the Utah Republican said in a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing Thursday, pointing to border statistics on nearby poster boards.
In April, more than 178,000 people attempted to cross illegally from Mexico into the United States between ports of entry or were denied admission at border crossings. The number is the highest monthly rate in 21 years and has more than doubled since Biden took office in January and rescinded many Trump-era border policies that had been in effect and deterred illegal migration.
Mayorkas testified that operations at the border were manageable even as the Biden administration has requested thousands of volunteers to assist DHS from non-law-enforcement agencies and has opened more than a dozen emergency facilities nationwide to hold migrant children before they are resettled in the U.S. Romney took issue with the secretary’s testimony in earlier exchanges and called Mayorkas’s stance “stunning.”
CRISIS WORSENS: 178,622 PEOPLE ATTEMPTED TO ILLEGALLY CROSS SOUTHERN BORDER IN APRIL
“Is this not a massive failure that would suggest that the administration needs to take immediate action to remedy what we’re seeing here?” Romney asked.
Mayorkas said the administration had taken immediate action resettling children who show up at the border in the U.S., but Romney said Biden was not stopping the flow of children arriving from Central America.
“The number coming into our country and being released into our country is at a skyrocketed level, as is this. The question is: Do you have plans to do something dramatically different such that those numbers come down to an acceptable level? Because, as you can imagine, this overwhelms our border control agents,” Romney said. “If they’ve got numbers like this they’re dealing with, this means that the drug cartels can be smuggling through drugs because our folks are taking care of kids. They’re taking care of people coming in illegally. Do we have plans to dramatically address what’s happening here?”
Mayorkas did not outline any plan to stop the flow of 17,000 children, 50,000 family members, and 100,000 adults who were encountered at the border last month. The secretary said the children had “certain rights” and that as a result of Biden’s policy changes earlier this year, children could not be turned away at the border and must be allowed into the U.S.
Romney told Mayorkas to “propose a new law” that would allow children to be turned away, and Mayorkas said 90% of children have a parent or legal guardian residing in the U.S. who has claimed asylum.
“So, this is not a problem then. Your view is that this is the way it’s going to be,” Romney said.
Since fiscal year 2021 began in October 2020, nearly 750,000 people have been encountered unlawfully trying to enter the U.S. from Mexico, more than the 459,000 in all of 2020. Over the past decade, an average of 30,000 to 50,000 people were encountered trying to get across the southern border unlawfully every month.
The Biden administration insists the southern border is not in a state of crisis despite having opened more than a dozen emergency shelters nationwide to house more than 20,000 children who showed up without parents.
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Nearly 110,000 people were returned to Mexico or their home country, while 63,000 migrant families and children were allowed into the U.S. and likely released from custody, federal data shows. As compared to 2000 and 2006, when large numbers of adults were seen at the border, families and children were not present. The difference in demographics has complicated the U.S. government’s response, especially as the Biden administration tried not to hold and detain families and children in jail-like Border Patrol stations.
