Before his Wednesday briefing on what to expect with the end of Title 42, it looks like Alejandro Mayorkas asked George Santos to hold his beer.
In a soft voice that could win him a job at NPR, the Homeland Security chief offered up a nonstop litany of lies, painting an alternate reality where the Biden administration takes border enforcement seriously.
LIE: “Our border is not open,” he insisted for the thousandth time. Yet the administration has waved well over a million illegal migrants into the interior and admits it’s seen more than half a million “gotaways” enter without interception just since October.
LIE: Once Title 42 expires, Mayorkas claimed, migrants will have only “very limited” chances to claim asylum. Huh? Millions have been allowed to apply for asylum, so much so the court backlog stretches YEARS. Is he claiming that Team Biden always had the ability to turn more migrants back, but just chose not to use it?
LIE: It’s all really “the fault of Congress,” which refuses to provide the needed resources, and our “broken immigration system that Congress hasn’t fixed” for two decades. But it was a Democratic Congress that denied his funding request last January, and funded 87,000 new IRS agents instead of boosting the Border Patrol.
And President Joe Biden did plenty of breaking of the system as soon as he took office, revoking every border-control policy the last guy had instituted except Title 42.
Plus, of course, the Biden prescription for “fixing” the immigration system amounts to legalizing as many would-be migrants as possible.
Indeed, Mayorkas kept repeating his talking point on how Biden has led “the largest expansion of lawful pathways ever” — as if that has anything to do with stopping the surge of illegal immigrants.
LIE: “The smugglers control the migratory path”; it’s their “lies” that have deceived so many into coming, and a new “digital ad campaign” will add to “ongoing communications efforts” to set would-be migrants straight.
No: The folks thinking about crossing are in regular contact with those who already have. And they’re sending the message south: The border is wide open.
Whoever Mayorkas thinks he’s fooling, it’s not working on the tens of thousands camped out all along the border, waiting for midnight Thursday.
We’re trying to imagine what lies Mayorkas will come up with then.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
