Mayorkas Defends Decision Not to Build Border Wall, Despite the Flood of Illegal Migrants

Between September 9 and 24, 2021, approximately 30,000 mostly Haitian migrants illegally crossed America’s southern border and gathered in Del Rio, Texas, where they hoped to be granted asylum. By September 25, approximately 12,400 of them had been released into the U.S. interior with instructions to report for immigration court hearings sometime in the future, while another 5,000 were being processed by DHS to determine whether they would be sent back to Haiti or permitted to pursue their immigration/asylum cases.

On September 26, 2021, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked Mayorkas: “You say 30,000 people walked across … into Del Rio in the last 17 days. Question: Why didn’t you stop them?” “We encounter them at the border. That’s where we encounter them, Chris,” Mayorkas replied.

Wallace then asked: “Why didn’t you stop them from coming into the country?” “We did,” Mayorkas stated. “We encountered them, they gathered – they assembled in that one location in Del Rio, Texas, and we applied the laws. We applied the public health law under the CDC’s authority, and we applied immigration –”

“My question is why did you allow them in the country in the first place?” Wallace replied. “Why didn’t you build, forgive me, a wall or a fence to stop them from walking – the flood of people coming across the dam, it looks like a highway that allows them to cross the Rio Grande.” “It is the policy of this administration, we do not agree with the building of the wall,” Mayorkas insisted, explaining that permitting individuals to seek humanitarian relief was “one of our proudest traditions.”