Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is scheduled to visit Arizona on Wednesday to tout the decline in illegal immigration since President Biden took executive action on asylum procedures three weeks ago.
Governor Mayorkas is scheduled to speak to reporters in Tucson. According to the Department of Homeland Security, arrests for illegal border crossings have fallen by more than 40% since the executive order took effect.
The latest Customs and Border Protection figures obtained by Fox News showed that Border Patrol encounters with illegal immigrants have fallen to a seven-day average of about 2,200 from well over 5,000. Appearing on MSNBC Wednesday morning, Mayorkas said the number of encounters at the border is “moving in the right direction.”
“As you point out, in the three weeks since implementing the president’s proclamation, encounters at the southwest border have decreased by more than 40 percent,” Mayorkas told host Mika Brzezinski, adding that this was a “remarkable implementation” by immigration enforcement agencies.
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Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas speaks in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, June 9, 2024. (Screenshot/ABC)
“We’re running more removal flights than ever before. We’re moving people through the system and those who don’t qualify are being removed or deported more quickly.”
The Border Patrol’s latest numbers are good news for President Biden, who must defend his record against a scathing attack from former President Trump during Thursday’s CNN presidential debate.
The US is seeing record numbers of migrants crossing the border, with more than 2.4 million in fiscal year 2023 alone, and three years of record numbers. Republicans and Trump have harshly criticised Biden for the crisis, accusing him of fuelling it with his policies and the rollback of Trump-era policies.
At a rally in Philadelphia over the weekend, Trump slammed Biden’s border policies, charging that they are “sending illegal criminals into our communities to rape, pillage, rob and murder.”
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Migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border are processed by U.S. Border Patrol near Jacumba Hot Springs in San Diego on June 13, 2024. (Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images)
“Just this week, a 12-year-old girl in Houston, Jocelyn Nangaray, walked to a 7-Eleven and was bound, stripped and strangled to death,” Trump said, referring to the suspected murder and sexual assault of a girl who was found strangled in a Texas creek last week.
“Those charged with Jocelyn’s heinous murder are two thugs, illegal immigrants recently sent to our country by Joe Biden, who crossed the border out of fear for their lives in Venezuela.”
If elected, Trump has pledged to launch the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history and end “the Biden Administration’s open border policy in its entirety.” He has also pledged to send special forces to the border and reinstate the 2017 travel ban.
Biden, meanwhile, has said Congress needs to pass reforms to fix a “broken” immigration system. He has proposed legislation that would give millions of undocumented immigrants in the US a path to citizenship, but Republicans oppose it.
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President Biden (left) and former President Trump are scheduled to face off in a presidential debate hosted by CNN on Thursday, June 27, 2024, with immigration expected to be a major topic of discussion. (AP Photo/Julia Nickinson and Evan Vucci)
Biden also supported a bipartisan Senate bill introduced earlier this year that failed to gain traction in the Senate, and he has blamed Trump for blocking the bill, which included additional funding for border security and a mechanism for closing the border above certain levels.
“Republicans in Congress, not all of them, have withdrawn from this bill. Why? Because Donald Trump told them to,” he said in February.
In the absence of progress in Congress, President Biden has taken unilateral action to further restrict migrants from applying for asylum if the border exceeds an average of 2,500 migrants per day. Last week, the president also announced exemptions from deportation for some undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens. But the president has repeatedly said that is not enough and that Congressional action is needed to fix the system.
Speaking on MSNBC, Mayorkas reinforced the president’s arguments, calling on Congress to “fix” a “broken immigration system.”
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“Let me remind you that our detention capacity is insufficient to handle the numbers that we encounter. This is not unique to our administration, but has been going on since the ’90s when I was a federal prosecutor,” he said. “We have to release people in immigration enforcement proceedings back into the United States, and then when necessary from an enforcement standpoint, we put them on alternatives to detention.”
House Republicans approved articles of impeachment against Mayorkas earlier this year, accusing him of “willfully and systematically refusing to comply with the law” and betraying the public trust.
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But the Democratic-controlled Senate declared those provisions unconstitutional and struck them down without a trial. Mayorkas last visited the US-Mexico border in May.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: This report has been updated to clarify that Mayorkas visited the U.S.-Mexico border in May 2024.
