Secret Service Hearing Tells You Everything You Need to Know About Mayorkas and the Border
‘Today, you failed to provide answers to basic questions’
By Andrew R. Arthur on July 26, 2024
For the past 40 months under the Biden administration, much of my professional time has been spent explaining the border — what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what will happen next. I can move on now, because if you want to know why the border is in the shape it is, just watch the disastrous testimony of Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle at a hearing last Monday before the House Oversight Committee on “Oversight of the U.S. Secret Service and the Attempted Assassination of President Donald J. Trump”. If Cheatle’s boss, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, has repeatedly refused to accept blame for — let alone be honest about — the disaster at the Southwest border, why should she be forthcoming with Congress about what happened on July 13 in Butler, Pa.?
The Homeland Security Act of 2002. When we were congressional staffers, my colleague George Fishman and I were among the primary drafters of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA), the legislation that created DHS.
The component agencies of the new department were largely drawn from preexisting agencies in other departments, though immigration was an outlier.
As I have explained in the past, the patent failures of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — then an agency within the Justice Department — to prevent 19 alien terrorists from carrying out the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil provided the spark that led to the immolation of the old “national-security” apparatus and the creation of a new department focused on “homeland security”.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Secret-Service-Hearing-Tells-You-Everything-You-Need-Know-About-Mayorkas-and-Border