Firing Mayorkas Must Be Part of Any Budget Deal

A key Republican demand in ongoing budget negotiations has to be that Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas must leave office — now. Although President Biden is ultimately responsible for our country’s illegal migration mess, removing Mayorkas, an extreme open-border ideologue, is an indispensable first step in addressing the crisis.

If Republicans in Congress close ranks, they could ensure that any budget deal includes replacing Mayorkas with a new, less-radical DHS secretary, one who actually believes in the good-faith implementation of existing U.S. immigration and border-security laws. Given what we know about Mayorkas, any budget agreement that calls for new border protection measures, while also leaving him in office to implement them, is probably doomed.

This DHS secretary is the antithesis of homeland security. Mayorkas’s reckless performance in office screams contempt for his highest duty, set down in law, “to control and guard the boundaries and borders of the United States against the illegal entry of aliens” (8 USC § 1103). Mayorkas has cast aside his fundamental security duty in favor of creating “humane pathways” for unauthorized migrants to come to America, a priority he has proclaimed many times at home and abroad.

Mayorkas’s rogue “humane pathways” doctrine is far outside the authorities of the DHS secretary and one that directly usurps the constitutional power of the Congress to set the limits of foreign migrants who enter the country. Mayorkas has denuded U.S. border protection and overturned visa laws; his policies have admitted millions of illegal migrants, putting at risk the basic security and health standards of scores of American cities and communities.

Before Mayorkas, U.S. border security, while often strained, was essentially working to protect the country. Rejecting counsel from DHS career officials, Mayorkas declines to enforce existing law because he is a committed open-border ideologue, convinced that America has no moral right to turn away the millions of economic migrants who want to cross our frontiers.

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[Read the rest at The American Conservative]