Mayorkas can’t solve the border crisis
Conn Carroll
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Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is perhaps the most dishonest figure involved in President Joe Biden’s border crisis, but he is not the one to blame for it, nor can he solve it.
Mayorkas is on a bit of a public relations campaign on Wednesday, telling MSNBC that climate change is the cause of the border surge and blaming former President Donald Trump for an asylum case backlog that has existed for decades but has gotten exponentially worse as Biden has released millions of illegal immigrants into the country after catching them at the southern border.
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This communications push comes after Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador last week in Mexico City. Before we touch on what happened in that meeting, let’s quickly establish what is causing the crisis — it’s not climate change — and what would be required to fix it.
One could write a thousand words on the causes of the border crisis, and one has, but the super short version is that the border was secure until Obrador was elected in 2018 and made it easier for migrants to pass through Mexico to the United States. Trump then solved the 2019 border crisis with his “Remain in Mexico” program that denied migrants illegally crossing the southern border access to the U.S. Crucially, this program took cooperation, albeit reluctant cooperation, from Mexico. Mexico had to be willing to take back those migrants to whom the U.S. denied entry.
On his first day in office, Biden ended the “Remain in Mexico” program and started creating loopholes in the Title 42 policy, which was not implemented until March 2020, long after “Remain in Mexico” solved the 2019 border crisis. Biden has since made it easier for more and more migrants to be released into the U.S., and that is the reason so many are coming.
Immigrants from around the world know that if they are caught illegally crossing the southern border, Biden will let them in. That’s why they are coming. Until that belief is changed, until immigrants understand they will be denied entry and forced to remain in Mexico, more will keep coming, and the crisis will continue.
Let’s flash back to the Blinken-Mayorkas trip to Mexico City last week. The Wall Street Journal reports, “The U.S. has spent months trying to persuade Mexico to allow the State Department to process refugees in Mexico.”
This is a good sign. Forcing migrants to remain in Mexico while their asylum claims are heard, thus denying them access to the U.S., would solve the crisis. But the Wall Street Journal continues, “Such an arrangement would likely require thousands of migrants to live in Mexico for months or longer while they await potential resettlement in the U.S., an idea that so far Lopez Obrador has rejected.”
Obrador’s rejection of Biden administration efforts to create a “Remain in Mexico 2.0” program is evident from the joint statement by the State Department after the meeting. There’s lots of talk about “root causes” and promoting “legal instead of irregular migration pathways.” There’s even a call for “regularizing” (that’s code for “granting amnesty to”) Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients.
But there isn’t anything anywhere in the document about Mexico working with the U.S. to take migrants who are denied entry into the U.S.
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And that’s the ball game.
Until Biden and Blinken are ready to put the screws to Obrador and make him take back migrants denied entry into the U.S., the crisis will continue.