The top immigration official says that the border plan is working
The Effects of Immigration on Humanitarian Relief: A Report from Mayorkas’s Congressional Office on We, The Voters 2024
The Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sat for an interview with Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep as part of NPR’s We, The Voters 2024 election series.
Republicans in the House of Representatives impeached Mayorkas for using parole to allow some migrants into the country. The charges were dismissed by the Senate.
Alejandro Mayorkas: What we want to do and what we do is enforce the law. And what that means is that if someone has a claim for humanitarian relief, if they claim asylum and their claim prevails, they have established a legal basis to remain in the United States. If their claim fails, then they are to be removed from the United States. The law is enforced by us.
The numbers have gone down. Migration is a dynamic phenomenon, so the numbers increase and they decrease. But the numbers have decreased. We have also removed or returned an historic number of people more this year than I think in any year since 2011.
John Modlin, the chief patrol officer for the Tucson sector, is very busy right now, and we talked with him during our reporting. He said the increase began in 2021, just as the Biden administration was taking office, and that migrants say they believed the laws would be different and that they would be allowed in. The administration tried to communicate differently and told people not to come, so why didn’t it work?
When is the border plan working? How the top immigration official says it is: Is biden’s border plan effective? The case of Alejandro Mayorkas
Mayorkas: Absolutely. I’ll ballpark it, but I don’t have the precise numbers. There were maybe about 560,000 encounters in 2018 and maybe close to a million in 2019.
Mayorkas: Well, remember what we are battling. We are battling sophisticated smuggling organizations that peddle in disinformation. We try to counter that reality with accurate information.
Inskeep speaks. Listening to you, it seems to me that I could define your policy difference with Republicans in part in this way: You want people to come lawfully. Republicans don’t want people to come or not so many people to come. Is that a fair description?
Inskeep: Or they just feel the asylum seekers specifically are taking advantage of the system. Let’s talk about the asylum-seekers and not other kinds of immigrants who may come here legally.
Mayorkas: I think that empirically, when one takes a look at the numbers who have claimed and the numbers who succeed, I would respectfully submit that the majority do not qualify.
Source: Is Biden’s border plan working? Here’s how the top immigration official says it is
How long is the border for asylum seekers? A Republican congressman in Mexico and the cost of it for a country that hasn’t
We talked to a Republican congressman who was born in Mexico. He says it’s taking too long for legal immigration applications to be processed while the border is unrestricted for arriving migrants. Is there something unfair about the current state of the law that allows people to come and say, “I want asylum” and they usually get several years before a court hearing?
The legislation would have ended the years-long process of removal of that individual. I wish the congressman had supported bipartisan legislation instead of opposing it. If people really want to fix the system, then they should advance solutions rather than really dwell on the problem and frankly perpetuate it by declining to implement solutions.
The congresswoman says that people who are looking for other lawful processes are taking more time because they have had to allocate resources to the challenge at the border. That’s not the only reason that the duration of time has been extended. You know, the prior administration gutted our legal immigration system, financially gutted. U.S. citizenship and immigration services. The backlogs would have been unneeded if they had actually promulgated a fee rule that was properly resourced.
Mayorkas said that the failed border lost Republican support in the Senate after Trump opposed it. $20 billion for border security was allotted in the deal, which made it harder for people to claim asylum.
Biden dealt with a lot of apprehensions at the border and a backlogged immigration system during his presidency, as he continued some Trump-era policies. He is being accused of being too soft on immigration or harsh on those trying to escape instability in their home countries.
Trump has vowed to be more aggressive on immigration in a second term, saying he would crack down on migrants and asylum-seekers at the border as well as immigrants already living in the country. In his first term, Trump enacted policies that separated thousands of children from their parents and ordered migrant asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases were evaluated.
From Immigrants to the U.S. Border: Reflections on Biden’s Policy on Arizona’s 6th Congressional District
“I’m very proud to be an immigrant, I did that when I was a child,” Ciscomani stated during the Morning Edition interview. “I’m proud of the journey that we traveled, to be here.”
The congressman from Arizona’s 6th Congressional District is a Republican. The district sits at the border of Mexico and the US. The border, and the hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving there, many requesting asylum, is a key issue for his district.
Ciscomani said he speaks to people every day who have been frustrated by trying to get some form of legal status in the U.S. that isn’t asylum and how long it takes.
They’re desperate because how long it’s taking. “While the border seems to be or actually is wide open for people to just cross it illegally.”
Here’s what he had to say about Biden’s border policies, his own beliefs about immigration, and why he stands with the Republican policies for fixing the crisis at the border.
The day I registered to vote at 26 is when I signed my paperwork to become a Republican. Before that, I knew that I was conservative. I knew my values.
Ciscomani: You’re correct. It’s a growing number. The first time that I interned on Capitol Hill, there were three Hispanic Republicans in Congress. We have 18 Hispanics who are Republicans in the United States Congress. The number is growing. It should grow even more.
There’s an acknowledgement that the policies aren’t working for us. If you think about why people come here, if you ask my parents, it’s like, hey, why did you make the move? You’re likely to get three main reasons. They will say a better job for them and the families, better education for their children, and safe streets. That hasn’t been the focus of many in the Democratic Party.
Inskeep: Immigration is one of the issues that are on people’s minds in 2024. Do you assume that in your district, immigration policy will be decisive for at least some voters?
I’m not assuming. For a fact, we know that. The issue that’s on top of people’s minds whenever I go is this. And it wasn’t always the case. Even though we’re a border district, a border state and immigration and border security has always been of interest and a priority for my district, It wasn’t always top. You know, you have other issues. Many other issues are important, like the economy, education and so on. The crisis and what’s happening has become reality for people that are now impacting their daily lives. Issues like street releases of migrants wasn’t something that kept people up at night a few years ago. The issue is if you talk to county officials. Ensuring that we don’t have a lot of releases a day is something that keeps them up.
Inskeep: As you probably know, there are a number of Republicans and people on the right who will offer a theory that Democrats are encouraging immigration, including illegal immigration, because they want them to become voters for them someday. Do you think that is true?
You know the reasons why the Democrats have allowed this and why Joe Biden has allowed this? I can’t tell you that. I don’t understand why someone would allow this. Initially, you could think that it’s incompetence, but honestly, that claim can only go so far. You can be this incompetent to not realize what’s happening. This is an election year and even in an election year when President Biden is facing the lowest approval numbers ever and border security and immigration is the number one issue, that issue has failed at the hands of Democrats. He’s still not doing anything about it.
Source: What Arizona’s Mexico-born Republican congressman thinks of the border situation
Implications of the 2016 Election Results for the American People in the Light of the U.S. Constitution and the 2020 Presidential Reionization Plan
Inskeep: Trump has even connected immigrants in this country to his election difficulties. He had a theory that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because illegal immigrants voted no evidence of that whatsoever. Is he making up stories about immigrants?
I’m not going to speculate on what the president said or attempt to understand what he meant by it. My state is seeing the consequences and we need to stop it. The policies that President Trump had three years ago, three and a half years ago, did not cause any of this. There is no legislative law that has changed. Joe Biden has done all his changes through executive order. The changes have cost us. We cannot keep doing what we’re doing by executive order. I like that President Trump acted on the border by executive order, because he didn’t have Congress to back him up. But he did it by executive order, which we learned is not sustainable because the next president can come in and change everything on day one, which is what Joe Biden did. And cost is the worst crisis in American history on the border.
