On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before the House Homeland Security Committee and Chairman Mark Green grilled Mayorkas on why now does he refer to the situation at the southern border a “crisis” but not a few weeks ago.
In his last testimony before Congress, Mayorkas refused to acknowledge the surge of illegal immigrants flooding the border as a crisis but during recent testimony he, for the first time, described the situation at the border a “crisis.” Chairman Green asked the secretary what events have changed in his calculation to elevate the illegal immigration surge as a “crisis.”
“Let me ask you this question. Just recently, your last trip here, you actually admitted that there was a crisis at the southwest border. What changed?” Chairman Green questioned Mayorkas.
“Nothing changed,” Mayorkas answered. “I have recognized the enormous challenge that the southern border presents ever since I began my tenure and actually well before that when I served as a deputy secretary.”
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During previous testimonies before Congress, Green asked Mayorkas why he wouldn’t describe the situation at the border a “crisis” rather claiming the opposite, that the border was actually “secure.”
“I have never minimized the challenge that the southern border presents,” Mayorkas said. “I didn’t minimize when I served as a federal prosecutor from 1989 to 2001.”
During an interview with the New York Times, Mayorkas said he is “not focused on the label that one appends to” the situation on the southern border,” but his focus lies “on the challenge that it is and what we can do about it.”
“The choice of language has become a proxy for the politics of the issue … Whatever we call it does not change what we are experiencing, and the challenge that it is,” he said to the Times
After his testimony before Congress, that didn’t go very well for him and the Biden administration, he began using the term “crisis” in interviews as he tries to deflect that both sides of the aisle are responsible.
“It certainly is a crisis, and, well, we don’t bear responsibility for a broken system,” Mayorkas said to NBC News. “And we’re doing a tremendous amount within that broken system.”