Mayorkas Says Biden ‘Quickly’ Cracked Down On Border Crisis — Several Years And Millions Of Migrants Later

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas argued that his administration “quickly” took executive action to stem illegal immigration, despite that order only coming after years into the nationwide border crisis.

Speaking to “PBS News Hour” in one of his latest exit interviews with the media, the outgoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief vigorously defended his record on border security — including that of his boss, President Joe Biden. While blaming congressional inaction and the prospect of litigation for his admin’s slow progress, Mayorkas contended that Biden acted swiftly on locking up the southern border, failing to mention that there were nearly ten million border encounters by that point in his administration.

“We sought funding for more Border Patrol agents, more ICE officers, more asylum officers, more immigration judges,” he said to PBS about his request to Congress. “We were denied.”

“We were again denied, and we moved into the bipartisan Senate negotiations that actually produced a transformative piece of legislation, the first in almost 30 years, only to see it politically torpedoed,” he continued. “And in light of that, the president quickly took executive action, which is now being litigated in the courts.”

The executive action Mayorkas was referencing was a presidential proclamation Biden made in June 2024 which unilaterally allowed the administration to limit the number of illegal migrants crossing the border. That proclamation proved successful in stemming illegal immigration — but only after border officials recorded the highest number of inadmissible crossings in U.S. history and months after Biden had claimed he couldn’t act alone to secure the border.

There were roughly 9,780,000 nationwide border encounters from the time Biden assumed office until that executive action was taken, according to data compiled by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

While much focus had been on the U.S.-Mexico border, encounters along the country’s northern border had also spiked to incredibly high levels under the Biden administration. Illegal crossings rose by more than 1,000% around the time Biden issued his executive order in June last year.

PBS host Amna Nawaz pointed out that, if border security was a priority for the administration, the president could’ve acted sooner on that executive order. In response, Mayorkas claimed that the order would’ve simply been “litigated earlier.”

While liberal groups quickly sued the Biden administration over the order, it has remained in place. In the midst of a tough presidential election and not wanting the order to be nixed, Biden even doubled down on the proclamation in September in order to keep it in place.

Critics of the administration were not the only ones who wished the president took action sooner to close up the southern border. Biden’s own Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief said he and many federal immigration enforcement officials wish he had done more and acted more quickly.

“I think the career people in [the Department of Homeland Security] would have liked that,” ICE acting director Patrick Lechleitner said during an interview with NBC News earlier in January. “And all of us in DHS, quite frankly, I don’t know if anybody in DHS wouldn’t have wanted that earlier.”

“We could have detained more people, and we could have removed more people,” Lechleitner. “And I think we could use more resources and support. We could have done that in the last four years.”

When Biden entered office in January 2021, he immediately took a number of actions to unwind the border security apparatus President Donald Trump had in place, such as ending the Remain in Mexico program, halting construction on the U.S.-Mexico border wall and even attempting to implement a moratorium on deportations.

Biden signed a total of 89 executive orders in his first year in office that specifically rolled back Trump-era immigration policies.