President Joe Biden’s top homeland security official refused to describe the U.S.-Mexico border as being in “crisis” during a Senate hearing, instead offering that the “entire hemisphere is suffering a migration crisis.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas forced the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection to resign last week but maintained before angry Republican senators that the border was not in a state of catastrophe.
“The entire hemisphere is suffering a migration crisis,” Mayorkas responded to Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-OH) question on whether the border was in crisis. “We are seeing an unprecedented movement of people from country to country. It is not restricted to the southern border.”
Portman, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, responded that the chief of the Border Patrol, Raul Ortiz, had recently been asked in a deposition in Florida if he viewed the border as being in a crisis. Ortiz agreed that it was. Mayorkas did not comment on why he broke with Ortiz.
BIDEN’S BORDER NUMBERS FOR OCTOBER BREAK RECORD WITH 277,464 ENCOUNTERS
Federal law enforcement at the border made more than a quarter of a million encounters with illegal immigrants in October, a new all-time record that blows past previous monthly records set during the Biden administration. The Department of Homeland Security has called in volunteers from across the federal government, even pulling federal air marshals from commercial flights to help process immigrants in custody at the border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers and agents came across 277,464 immigrants who tried to get into the United States at land, air, and sea ports without permission, according to federal data released earlier this week.
Approximately 159,000 were single adults, 59,000 were members of a family, and 12,000 were unaccompanied children. The Biden administration has explained the rise from an average of 30,000 to 50,000 encounters per month in the 2010s as the result of repeat crossers.
The majority of people encountered, 230,678, occurred on the southern border, and roughly 45,000 of that number had been previously caught trying to enter and turned away but tried to enter again. The nearly 190,000 encounters of individual people is still four times the number seen under the Obama and Trump administrations.
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By mid-December, U.S. border officials will no longer be able to turn some illegal immigrants away under a pandemic-era policy that allowed them to do so rather than take custody of each person. Republicans have called for the Biden administration to continue the Title 42 policy on the basis that more people will attempt to illegally enter the country if they know they will not be immediately sent back to Mexico.
