Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted in a private conversation with Border Patrol agents that the immigration crisis at the southern border is “unsustainable.”
“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico, and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said on Thursday, according to audio of the conversation obtained by Fox News. “We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it.”
Mayorkas also said he was “very well” aware that sections of the southern border recently came close to “breaking” as tens of thousands of migrants flooded the area, forcing immigration officials to set up emergency camps to house them.
“It’s our responsibility to make sure that never happens again,” he told the Border Patrol agents.
Last month, agents encountered more than 212,000 illegal immigrants, marking a 13% increase from the previous month.
Mayorkas acknowledged that July’s surge was “one of the toughest challenges we face.”
However, at the same time, Mayorkas has also tried to blame former president Donald Trump for the border crisis.
He claimed Trump didn’t do enough to solve the roots of migration, blasting the Republican for cutting funding to the Northern Triangle countries.
“Tragically, former President Trump slashed our international assistance to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Slashed the resources that we were contributing to address the root causes of a rate of irregular migration,” he said on Thursday.
But immigration experts have pointed the blame squarely at President Joe Biden’s feet for repealing many of the immigration policies Trump had implemented.
“For those of us who have been around here long enough … we don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” one agent told Mayorkas. “We’ve had this happen before. We know exactly how to shut it down. We need to make illegal entry illegal.”
