The Biden administration has blamed President Trump for the illegal-immigration surge while insisting it is managing the problem, but Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is heard in a leaked audio admitting the situation is “unsustainable” and “we’re going to lose.”
The comments came in private remarks Thursday to Border Patrol agents during his visit to the Texas border, Fox News reported.
Publicly, Mayorkas announced there were more than 212,000 migrant encounters by agents in July, a 13% increase from the previous month. He admitted the issue was “one of the toughest challenges we face.”
But in his private remarks he was candid.
“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico, and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said, according to the audio obtained by Fox News’ Bill Melugin through a Border Patrol source.
“We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it.”
Mayorkas told the agents he was “very well” aware that the sector recently came close to “breaking.”
“It’s our responsibility to make sure that that never happens again,” he said.
Earlier this year, President Biden insisted the surge was largely due to seasonal migration, but the increase in traffic during the sweltering summer months indicates otherwise.
In the audio, an exasperated border agents is heard criticizing the administration’s approach to the crisis.
“For those of us who have been around here long enough … we don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” the agent told Mayorkas. “We’ve had this happen before. We know exactly how to shut it down. We need to make illegal entry illegal.”
Reacting to the leaked audio, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is calling on Mayorkas to resign.
“We can’t have a defeatist fighting for our nation’s border security,” he tweeted. “It’s time for Sec. Mayorkas to resign, and he needs to be replaced with someone who will tell the truth publicly & stand up to the radical activists inside the Biden-Harris administration.”
Former ICE acting director Tom Homan told Fox News on Friday that the leaked remarks show Mayorkas has been lying to the American people by insisting the border is closed and there is no crisis.
Homan said he’s received a lot of criticism for saying for the past seven months that Biden and Mayorkas have been lying about the border.
He noted that Mayorkas was deputy DHS secretary in 2014 and 2015 under Obama at the time of a previous border surge.
“He knows what causes them, he knows how to stop them,” Homan said of Mayorkas.
“Our border is out of control,” Homan said. “We have a crisis.”
Mayorkas blames Trump for crisis
In his public announcement of the July figures, Mayorkas blamed the Trump administration, contending the former president’s policies undermined efforts to address the “root causes.”
“Former President Trump slashed our international assistance to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, slashed the resources that we were contributing to address the root causes of irregular migration,” Mayorkas said.
However, it was Trump’s freezing of $450 million in aid in April 2019 to the Northern Triangle countries that forced them to the negotiating table, leading to policies that helped reduce migration.
In October 2019, the Trump administration announced some “targeted assistance” would resume after reaching immigration agreements.
“Guatemala, Honduras & El Salvador have all signed historic Asylum Cooperation Agreements and are working to end the scourge of human smuggling. To further accelerate this progress, the U.S. will shortly be approving targeted assistance in the areas of law enforcement & security,” Trump said on Twitter at the time.
Under the agreements, asylum-seekers had to first seek safe haven in a third country on the way to the United States. The administration argued the majority of asylum-seekers were economic migrants who would stay home if their only option was to seek asylum somewhere else. Anyone applying for asylum must be either the victim of past persecution have a well-founded fear of future persecution.
The Biden administration terminated all three agreements in February.
President Biden also has terminated Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which sent asylum seekers back to Mexico to await their U.S. immigration court hearing.
The Squad isn’t happy
Now, the Biden administration is moving away from its early policies in which it prided itself in unraveling Trump’s measures.
The administration, for example, is trying to keep in place Trump’s Title 42 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, allowing for the expulsion of most single adults and many families without being given the chance to seek asylum.
DHS also wants more expulsion flights into the interior of Mexico to prevent migrants from simply coming back for “another try,” Mayorkas said.
And Mayorkas is calling for additional agents, angering progressive Democrats, including members of the “Squad,” Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.
The lawmakers declared in a statement in 2020 that Customs and Border Protection and ICE are “rogue agencies that act to inflict harm on our communities and have a pattern of behavior of abuse and mismanagement of funds.”
Listen to the leaked audio:
LEAKED AUDIO: Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the border crisis:
“This is unsustainable. These numbers cannot continue.”
— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) August 13, 2021
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