Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is insulted that people are accusing him of intentionally not enforcing our nation’s immigration laws.
In a puff profile in the New Yorker, Mayorkas tells his interviewer, “I’m in disbelief, just frankly. As someone who has spent twenty years in government, twelve years of which were spent as a federal prosecutor, the accusation that I’ve intentionally chosen not to enforce the laws is beyond the pale.”
Beyond the pale! How dare Republicans accuse Mayorkas of not enforcing immigration laws.
But then, 10 paragraphs later, we are told: “Away from the border, immigration arrests that result in deportations are also down, in part because of a series of directives from Mayorkas that have emphasized discretion. ‘You don’t hear about ICE picking up grandmothers,’ he told me. ‘Even during Obama, that was a huge issue. We have changed the landscape.’ But Biden has seemed reluctant to tout these successes.”
So, grandmothers in the country illegally are not being picked up by ICE for deportation. Did Congress pass a law exempting grandmothers from deportation? No. Mayorkas issued a memo shortly after he was confirmed by the Senate forbidding ICE agents from removing any illegal immigrant from the country unless they were a threat to national security or public safety.
Far from applying to just grandmothers, this applies to all illegal immigrants, even young single men with multiple DUI convictions. And you can see the results of Mayorkas’s intentional policy of not enforcing the law in the statistics. In the last year before COVID, ICE removed 85,958 immigrants from the interior of the country. In Biden’s first year, that number fell to 31,557. And the vast majority of those removed were removed for either criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, not immigration violations.
Later in the profile, the New Yorker shares this anecdote: “That May, Mayorkas traveled to the offices of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, in Washington, for a meeting with about forty representatives from several of the most prominent advocacy organizations in the country… Mayorkas asked the attendees a question: What did they think that the government should do if a migrant, with a lawyer, applied for asylum but eventually lost her case both before a judge and on appeal? He waited for someone to acknowledge that such a person, by law, would have to be removed. No one spoke.”
No one spoke because the open-borders activists that control the Democratic Party don’t believe any immigrant, once released into the United States, should be deported just for entering the country illegally. And Mayorkas has implemented that exact policy!
That is why, as the New York Times reports, immigrants know that if they can just get released into the U.S., they can stay forever. No Democratic president will ever track them down and deport them.
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This is also why Sen. James Lankford’s (R-OK) immigration reform bill was such a farce. While Lankford claims his legislation would “detain and deport” immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the border, the actual legislation did the exact opposite. Under Lankford’s bill, all immigrants who asked for protection and were placed in the bill’s new asylum screening process were to be released from custody. It is right there on page 116: “Aliens referred for proceedings under this section shall be released from physical custody.”
Instead of ending “catch and release,” Lankford’s bill legalized it. And with Mayorksas as secretary, once released into the country, no immigrant has any reason to fear Mayorkas will track them down and deport them.