Washington, D.C. (August 3, 2023) – The House Committee on Homeland Security recently released a 110-page interim report as a part of its oversight investigation into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. A Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the report examines the committee’s case for charging Secretary Mayorkas with dereliction of duty, highlighting the department’s failures at the southwest border.
 
Elizabeth Jacobs, author of the analysis, writes, “The report focused heavily on the Biden administration’s violations and abuses of law. Most importantly, the committee reiterated that the Biden administration has abused the parole statute through its creation of numerous parole programs. Secretary Mayorkas has used these never-authorized parole programs to allow hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens to enter and work in the United States, circumventing both the eligibility and numerical limits set by Congress at the expense of the legal immigration system.”
 
In its report, the House Homeland Security Committee stated that, “Over the past two years, Mayorkas has repeatedly ignored or refused to enforce immigration laws passed by Congress, ended commonsense, effective border security policies, implemented an open-borders agenda that has spread millions of illegal aliens throughout the United States, and continuously misled Congress and the American people about his actions and the nature of the border crisis sparked by his policies.”
 
The committee’s report highlighted statistics that demonstrated the extent of the chaos at the border, including more than 5.45 million encounters at the Southwest border since January 2021, with total nationwide encounters of more than 6.45 million; more than 1.5 million known “got-aways” recorded by CBP since FY 2021, which brings total recorded illegal crossings since January 2021 to at least 7.5 million; and 241 individuals on the Terrorist Screening Data Set (TSDS) have been caught between border ports of entry on the northern and southern borders since FY 2021, compared to just 14 individuals on the TSDS caught between ports of entry from FY 2017-2020.
 
The report concluded that, “on top of these failures to uphold the law and fulfill his oath of office, Mayorkas has willfully undermined ... the separation of powers,” stating that, “He has rejected his responsibility to enforce the laws passed by Congress, and has refused to respect rulings by the federal judiciary.”

Read more: “Homeland Security Committee Releases First Interim Investigative Report into Secretary Mayorkas’ Dereliction of Duty”