During Tuesday’s “Your World” broadcast on the Fox News Channel, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asserted that the Biden administration “took action” to secure the border “a long time ago” and has been “enforcing the law from day one,” acknowledging that the impact of policies can sometimes take time.
Host Neil Cavuto, while discussing the Senate immigration bill, queried, “Alright, but the President’s doing a lot of things that are in this measure already, and a lot of people criticize him for doing that, what took you so long? Including this measure to shut down the border once there are 4,000 crossings a day, some of these other things to speed up asylum adjudication and try to get it done in 180 days rather than waiting for years, stuff that President Biden could have done all along but didn’t, doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
Cavuto then followed up, “But I guess it struck a lot of people as odd — no disrespect, Secretary, Chad Wolf, your predecessor, was among those saying, we’re almost three and a half years into a crisis, and only now are they starting to take these executive actions, these are actions that we had been pleading with the administration to take for two and a half to three years. What do you say to that?”
Mayorkas responded, “That’s not accurate. That’s what I say. We implemented the asylum officer rule through regulation. We implemented the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule through regulation. We have built additional facilities, deployed enforcement and removal operations officers. This year, we have removed or returned more than 720,000 people who do not qualify for relief under the law, more than any full fiscal year since 2011. We’ve been enforcing the law from day one, despite the political rhetoric that suggests otherwise.”
