Mayorkas blames Congress for border rush Republicans say look in mirror

WASHINGTON — For Alejandro Mayorkas, the buck stops there.

The Homeland Security secretary attempted to blame Congress Thursday for a historic wave of illegal migration expected at the US-Mexico border when the Title 42 COVID-19 expulsion policy ends — claiming President Biden wasn’t responsible for the migrant crisis that began after he took office.

“This is an ongoing challenge that quite frankly has vexed this country for decades because this country has been unable, Congress has been unable, to pass immigration reform that everyone agrees and understands is desperately needed,” Mayorkas told reporters during a White House press briefing.

When asked by a CNN reporter about Biden saying Tuesday there would be a “chaotic” period to come, Mayorkas again attempted to blame Congress, without specifying which reforms would stem a rush.

“The fundamental reason why we have a challenge at our border — and we’ve had this challenge many a time before — is because we are working within the constraints of a broken, a fundamentally broken immigration system,” he insisted.

House Republicans, who are pushing legislation to impose much stricter border policies, returned fire and blamed the crisis on the White House.

“From day one, Secretary Mayorkas was a man on a mission of destruction: To tear down border security, ignore clear immigration law, and blame Republicans for the catastrophe that inevitably occurred,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Post.

Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.), who also is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, added: “The only ones to blame for the crisis at our southern border are Joe Biden and the Democrats.”

“For two years, Democrats had control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, and did nothing but incentivize this crisis with radical open border policies. As a result, every community is now a border community,” Cline added.

“House Republicans, on the other hand, are taking action to tackle this crisis by bringing to the floor the strongest immigration package that Congress has ever considered.”

On his first day in office in January 2021, Biden halted funding to construct former President Donald Trump’s US-Mexico border wall.

That June, Biden ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that required most asylum seekers who reached the southern border to await US court rulings on the other side of the Rio Grande.

The Biden administration also gradually rolled back Title 42 enforcement — at first for unaccompanied children, then family units and increasingly single adults — and created a new step of issuing migrants orders to report to severely backlogged ICE offices to get a court summons, rather than issue them immediately upon an asylum-seeker’ss release from detention.

In New York City, appointments for migrants waiting to get a court date after illegally crossing the southern border were “mostly booked” through March 2033 as of last month.

Once migrants get a court date, they must wait an average of nearly four more years before proceedings are completed.

Mayorkas faces an impeachment push from House Republicans over his department’s management of the crisis, which the Biden administration often attributes to poor economic conditions in other countries and factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and crime.

There were nearly 2.4 million arrests for illegally crossing the US-Mexico border in fiscal 2022, which ended Sept. 30 — up from an elevated 1.7 million in fiscal 2021, fewer than 500,000 in fiscal 2020 and nearly 1 million in fiscal 2019.

Those figures do not include migrants who evaded arrest.

So far in fiscal 2023, apprehensions of migrants are up 4% at the southern border.

Although Mayorkas didn’t spell out how Congress should fix the “broken” immigration system in terms of new policies, Biden upon taking office asked Congress to pass legislation that would create “an earned roadmap to citizenship” for most of the people currently living in the US without legal permission, which critics said would further incentivize new arrivals.

The White House has also urged a boost in immigration court capacity to process asylum claims — though current administrative and judicial backlogs can drag out the process for longer than a decade.

Mayorkas refused to say at the White House briefing whether he agrees with the reported prediction of one of his subordinates that there would be about 18,000 people per day illegally crossing the border.

“Those weren’t predictions,” he said.

“It is our responsibility in the Department of Homeland Security, across the administration, to plan for different scenarios. That’s what we do. And so what we developed was, in fact, different scenarios to which we plan and so we have done so and we continue to do so.”

But Mayorkas, whose agency intends to temporarily release migrants if facilities become full, was emphatic that the border isn’t “open.”

“We removed, returned, and expelled 1.4 million people last year. Ask those 1.4 million people if they think the border is open,” he said.

“Our apprehension rate at the border is consistent with the average apprehension rate in prior years.”

The Biden administration released into the US 802,396 non-citizens apprehended after illegally crossing the southwest border between late March 2021 through Feb. 13, according to a Feb. 18 document on ICE letterhead.

At one point, Mayorkas acknowledged Thursday that Mexican criminal cartels are in control of which migrants reach the border, saying, “It is no longer the case that individuals can on their own reach the southern border of the United States. They have to place their lives and their life savings in the hands of ruthless smugglers that exploit them and ruthlessly do so.”

Later, Mayorkas took as an example of the “broken” system an inability of migrants to book appointments via a new smartphone app as part of a “parole” program for four nationalities — Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans — who since January have been eligible for 30,000 lawful entries per month. 

Mayorkas said DHS is allowing about 740 migrants per day from the cohort into the US or fewer than 23,000 per month.

“What we are fundamentally driving to is to build lawful pathways so people do not have to take after make those difficult decisions, and they don’t have to take the dangerous journey in the first place,” Mayorkas said.

“There are businesses around this country that are desperate for workers,” he added.

“There are desperate workers looking for jobs, desperate workers in foreign countries that are looking for jobs in the United States where they can earn money lawfully and send much-needed remittances back home. What is the cost of a broken immigration system? That is the question that I am asked, and that is the question that I posed to Congress because it is extraordinary cost.”