DHS head Mayorkas spars with House GOP and blames Trump for border troubles by Virginia Aabram,

Posted By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dhs-head-mayorkas-spars-with-house-gop-and-blames-trump-for-border-troubles

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sparred with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee over the crisis at the southern border, while he and the Democratic lawmakers blamed the Trump administration for his department’s troubles.

While the GOP members pressed Mayorkas on migration statistics at the Thursday oversight hearing, Democrats acknowledged that he “inherited something of a mess,” as Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said.

“One of the greatest obstacles we have, Mr. Chairman, is to overcome the distrust that was sown by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. “Through its global policies, many still feel fearful, given what trauma they experienced and continue to experience.”

Nadler said that “the previous administration did all it could to break our immigration system” by enforcing family separation policies in which “children were literally kidnapped from their mothers and fathers with no plans to reunite them” and doing everything in its “power to block legal pathways.”

Mayorkas, in response to Lofgren’s lamentation of the state of the immigration system left by former President Donald Trump, agreed that “the prior administration decimated the legal immigration system, leaving U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that administers our nation’s legal immigration system, on the brink of bankruptcy.”

 

Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Steve Chabot asked, “How many migrants [he has] shipped to Ohio?” Mayorkas said that he “disagree[d] with the phrasing of your question, but I would be pleased to provide you with data with respect to that.”

“Let’s see if you actually do that,” Chabot said.

Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, pressed the secretary on how, under his leadership, immigration is supposed to benefit the public.

Mayorkas began to answer, “Congressman, when an individual is encountered at the southern border, they are placed in immigration enforcement proceedings —”

“OK, you don’t have an answer for how any of this benefits Americans,” McClintock interrupted.

 

Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with the Biden administration’s handling of the border crisis as Title 42, a pandemic-era measure allowing migrants to be turned away at the border, is set to expire on May 23.

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