Mayorkas: ‘If We’d Known that Irresponsible Politics Would’ve Killed a Meritorious Effort ... Perhaps We Would’ve Taken Executive Action More Rapidly’

Mayorkas: “It is something that has gripped the entire hemisphere and the world.”
BRENNAN: “I think you have said to me one of the very first things the Biden Administration did was ask Congress to act in the earliest days.”
Mayorkas: “Yes. Yes.”
BRENNAN: “And then, fast forward, you had this bipartisan near-miss on a border bill. All that time passed. Why wait until five months before the U.S. election to put in place those asylum restrictions that did cut off the flow, that ended the crisis?”
Mayorkas: “Margaret, remember where — Margaret, remember where we were when the president took office. We were in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The prior administration had imposed Title 42, which is a public health authority, and enabled us to expel individuals, to continue to expel individuals at the border, as the prior administration had done.”
BRENNAN: “Right.”
Mayorkas: “There was tremendous pressure to maintain the workings of Title 42, which we did. That held until May of 2023. We then turned to Congress, and we asked for supplemental funding that was desperately needed to make our administration of a broken immigration system work much better. We were denied. We went back to Congress a second time and requested supplemental funding. Denied. We then turned to the bipartisan negotiations, which proved successful, which were then killed. The result of it, a really terrific solution was killed by irresponsible politics. Looking back now in hindsight, in 2020, if we had known that irresponsible politics would have killed what was clearly a meritorious effort and a meritorious result, perhaps we would have taken executive action more rapidly.”
BRENNAN: “Because Republicans argue, in this back-and-forth over whose job it is to fix the problem, Congress would argue there was executive authority that could have been used before Congress legislated, and they point back to the crisis starting at day one, when Trump era immigration policy was peeled back, Remain in Mexico, the 100-day moratorium on most deportations that was announced, the halt to wall construction. Did those measures — and I know you weren’t yet in office personally, but did those measures set you up for failure?”
Mayorkas: “Remember something. Remain in Mexico is touted as the great panacea. The trend lines of migration were increasing quite exponentially from 2018 to 2019. And that is reflected worldwide. And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Remember something also about the executive action that the president took in May — in June of this year. We also, over time, built capabilities that we did not previously have, not just domestically, the number of facilities that we stood up, the ability to transport individuals and decompress areas that were experiencing surges of individuals, but our negotiations with Mexico, with other countries in Latin America and around the world. We are now removing or returning more individuals in three years than the prior administration did in four. And we are doing so not only greater in volume, but greater in speed, because of the negotiations with other countries, and to more countries than has ever been the case.”