On Sunday (April 30), Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accused Congress of failing to do more to help the growing immigration crisis while defending the Biden administration, saying it was doing everything it could with a “broken immigration system.”
Mayorkas made these remarks while speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which came nearly two weeks after he testified before the House Homeland Security Committee, in which he repeatedly emphasized that the U.S. border is “secure.”
Mayorkas noted that the U.S. — and the hemisphere in general — was experiencing “unprecedented” migration, explaining that the surge in migration wasn’t limited to the Southern Border.
Mayorkas added that he believed the hemisphere was experiencing the largest migration since World War II.
Mayorkas noted that President Joe Biden had “delivered a solution” to the crisis on his first day in office in the form of immigration reform legislation, and Mayorkas blamed Congress for being slow to act.
He added that the Biden administration was working “within the constraints of a broken immigration system,” noting that the administration’s approach is to build “lawful pathways” and repel unscrupulous smugglers while providing migrants with a route to receive humanitarian aid without having to make the “dangerous journey” from their homeland.
However, the Homeland Security Secretary explained that should Migrants enter the U.S. southern border between ports of entry, they soul have to bear the “consequences.”
Mayorkas repeated his blame for a “totally broken immigration system” and said there was a backlog of more than 2 million immigration cases that was growing every year.
The backlog was worsened by a change the administration made two months after Biden took office when Border Patrol agents began the now-discontinued practice of quickly paroling immigrants.
