Mayorkas boasts illegal border crossings fell 65% under new Biden policies

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took a victory lap Thursday over the dropping number of illegal immigrants trying to sneak across the southern border, saying it’s evidence that his carrot-and-stick approach is paying off.

He said the administration has tamped down the numbers by building “pathways” for unauthorized migrants to reach the U.S., threatening “consequences” for those who arrive outside those pathways and increasing standards to discourage bogus asylum claims.

The result, he said, has been a 65% drop in “border encounters.”

“We are meeting people where they are,” Mr. Mayorkas said at the Aspen Security Forum.

Although the pathways he has created face legal questions, Mr. Mayorkas said they are the key to giving migrants some hope of reaching the U.S. and discouraging them from paying smugglers to bring them across the border illegally.

He said it’s tough to discourage a mother from sending a juvenile girl to the U.S. because it’s dangerous for the child to walk to school in their neighborhood.

Given the current system, he suggested, the best alternative is to siphon them away from smugglers, who can charge $10,000 or more per person and who have been blamed for record numbers of migrant deaths over the past two years.

“Our hope is that our model of incentivizing people to apply for relief before they take the journey and delivering a consequence regime if they don’t avail themselves of those pathways works and keeps a cap, if you will, on the number of people we encounter under very dangerous circumstances,” Mr. Mayorkas said.

The carrot-and-stick approach is still in development, but the dynamic of illegal immigration has shifted dramatically over the past two months.

The Border Patrol, which nabs people who try to sneak into the U.S. between official crossings, said its arrests along the U.S.-Mexico boundary dropped from nearly 184,000 in April to fewer than 100,000 in June. Meanwhile, officers at the ports of entry along the southern border reported a rise in encounters from about 28,000 in April to 45,000 in June.

Tens of thousands more are flying into airports inside the U.S. under “parole” programs that Mr. Mayorkas created for Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Ukrainians.

Critics point out that those migrants coming through the ports of entry are in the country without legal visas. The only difference is that they scheduled an arrival to meet Mr. Mayorkas’ new framework.

Mr. Mayorkas made his remarks as the Republican-controlled House was pondering impeachment proceedings against him.

The Homeland Security Committee released a report Wednesday accusing Mr. Mayorkas of “dereliction of duty.” The report cataloged at least a dozen laws or court orders that the secretary has flouted, as well as two dozen “lies to Congress” and more than 50 “lies to the American people.”

Other Republicans point to ongoing dangers from the immigration crisis, including a record number of terrorism suspects encountered sneaking across the border from Mexico and the detection of record flows of fentanyl.

“If this is what the Biden administration calls a plan that’s ‘working as intended,’ I’d hate to see what they think failure looks like,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican.

Mr. Mayorkas has overseen the worst border chaos in history. Customs and Border Protection recorded 2.8 million encounters with unauthorized migrants in 2022 and 2.3 million over the first nine months of fiscal year 2023.

The Congressional Budget Office said at least 1.5 million of those were caught and released under Mr. Mayorkas’ “parole” authority from Oct. 1, 2021, through April 2023. The Center for Immigration Studies says the total number of catch-and-release migrants is more than 2 million.

Mr. Mayorkas acknowledged that the immigration system is broken and people are taking advantage of the asylum pathways, but he bristled at the notion that migrants are gaming the system.

That was when he raised the idea of the girl who can’t walk safely to school and whose mother sends her on the journey north.

“That speaks to the level of desperation,” he said. “That daughter may not be fleeing persecution … but at the same time she’s not gaming the system.”

Mr. Mayorkas was interviewed at the forum by Fareed Zakaria, who works for CNN and who repeatedly sought to blame Republicans for the chaos in the immigration system.

“Let me put it bluntly: Do you think that Republicans in Congress want to solve this problem or want to keep it alive because it works very well as election politics for them?” he prodded the secretary.

Mr. Mayorkas let Mr. Zakaria’s words carry the day. “I’ve heard that opinion expressed,” he said.

The secretary did make a point about the importance of words.

He highlighted his early directive to forbid the use of words such as “illegal” and “alien” and his order that all migrants, whether they arrived legally or not, be grouped under the term “noncitizens.”

“We would not use the term illegal alien when speaking of these individuals. We would use the term noncitizen. And that speaks to the importance of respecting the dignity of the individual,” Mr. Mayorkas said.