VOA: Mayorkas ‘Warns Borders Being Rendered Meaningless’
Headline reveals disconnect between DHS’s concerns and Biden’s border policies
By Andrew R. Arthur on December 12, 2022
Voice of America (VOA) recently published an article captioned: “US Homeland Security Chief Warns Borders Being Rendered Meaningless”, referring to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. For those aware of the administration’s feckless border policies, the headline may be unintentionally funny, but the contents reveal a serious disconnect between the secretary’s concerns and the president’s policies at the U.S.-Mexico line.
Rapid Disintegration in Border Security Under Biden. Joe Biden was the fortuitous beneficiary of what his first Border Patrol chief, Rodney Scott, described in September 2021 as “arguably the most effective border security in” U.S. history. The chief asserted, however, that this security rapidly disintegrated as “border security recommendations from experienced career professionals” were “ignored and stymied by inexperienced political employees”.
It’s not clear whether Scott was targeting Mayorkas, the top political appointee at DHS, directly, as few would describe the secretary as “inexperienced”. Rather, he was deputy secretary at DHS from 2013 to 2016, before which he served as head of USCIS between 2009 and 2013.
At DHS, Mayorkas oversaw some of the lowest levels of apprehensions at the Southwest border in decades. In fact, he was in the job in FY 2014, when the Obama administration moved to curb a surge in migrant adults entering illegally with children in “family units” (FMUs) by expanding FMU detention so effectively that DHS faced lawsuits by the plaintiffs in the Flores settlement agreement and others.
https://cis.org/Arthur/VOA-Mayorkas-Warns-Borders-Being-Rendered-Meaningless