‘The results are dramatic’: DHS Secretary Mayorkas says far fewer migrant kids are being held at border
WASHINGTON — Despite a surge of migrants at the southern border, the Biden administration has made strides to ensure kids are no longer being held in border facilities, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified Thursday.
“The challenge is not behind us, but the results are dramatic,” Mayorkas told members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
Mayorkas cited large drops in the numbers of children being held in various stages in the system.
He noted that in late March, 5,767 children were in the custody of Customs and Border Protection. That number had been cut to 455 earlier this week, he said.
On March 29, more than 4,000 kids had been in custody for more than the permitted 72 hours. Two days ago, the number was zero, said the DHS secretary.
While Republicans continue to blame the Biden administration on the current crisis, Mayorkas pointed fingers at the former Trump administration.
“The surge of unaccompanied children first began in April of last year, April 2020, and it swelled from there,” he said.
When asked by committee chairman Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) what the Trump White House did to respond to the new surge, Mayorkas said “they did nothing.”
“What they did was they dismantled the tools that we had to address it. And they tore down the programs that could have helped alleviate the pressure,” he said.
The Trump administration infamously dealt with its own surge at the border by holding thousands of people in mass detention centers and separating families, some of whom have never been reunited with children.
Mayorkas’s blame-shifting infuriated Republicans on the committee, who hauled out charts showing the surge in border crossings and the number of detained kids increasing in the early days of Biden’s term, with more than 170,000 apprehensions in March alone.
“I’m not able to sit here and not comment on this idea that somehow this is Donald Trump’s fault,” snapped Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “They didn’t know (preparations) were necessary because the kids weren’t coming in. These are the facts.
“I’m all for providing asylum to people who really have a credible fear of persecution, but what we have done instead is just open the doors,” Portman added.
Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson claimed that the surge during the Trump administration was actually Democrats’ fault.
“It started ramping up when Democratic presidential candidates started talking about open borders and free health care,” Johnson said.
Johnson also argued that Trump’s draconian policies worked. “We pretty well stopped is a robust surge of illegal immigration at the border,” he said.
Mayorkas fought back against that claim.
“They ripped sons and daughters out of the hands of fathers and mothers, and said they would never see each other again,” said Mayorkas, who himself arrived in the U.S. with his parents as a child refugee from Cuba.
“That’s one of the things, and maybe that worked and maybe it didn’t, but I’ll tell you what it didn’t work for is the values and principles of this country.”
The DHS secretary argued that the broader solution involves working with Central American countries to allow families and children to apply for asylum at home instead of making the dangerous trek to the border.
He said the administration is already working on those initiatives, but that Congress needs to pass immigration reform laws to make the entire system more sensible.
