NumbersUSA has reported that Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has written a public letter calling for the resignation of Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The senator cited the border crisis caused by the Biden Administration’s lax enforcement policies, which has resulted in breaking the record for encounters with border crossers for the last two years in a row, as the reason for his request that Mayorkas tender his resignation.
This August, 203,597 aliens were encountered at the border or at immigration field offices, according to Customs and Border Enforcement. Year-to-date, the grand total of alien encounters has risen to 2,150,639, the highest level ever seen. The former record of 1,734,686 aliens occurred in FY2021, also under Biden and Mayorkas.
NumbersUSA is a nonpartisan immigration reduction advocacy organization that mobilizes its members to lobby decision-makers to improve the broken U.S. immigration system. The group was founded by its President, Roy Beck, partly in response to two national commissions on immigration issues. One was a bipartisan congressional commission chaired by former Rep. Barbara Jordan, and another was a commission created under presidential authority and chaired by former Sen. Tim Wirth. Both commissions found that reducing immigration numbers towards their historical average was in the best interest of the United States and its authorized residents.
As the NumbersUSA report points out, the total 3.3 million aliens apprehensions that have occurred from the time President Biden took office doesn’t include the many thousands of illegal aliens who are considered “got-aways” each month because they escape apprehension when crossing the border.
In his letter, Senator Hawley stated:
“I write with alarm over record-setting levels of illegal immigration into our country. According to your own department’s statistics, Customs & Border Protection agents have now encountered over 2 million illegal immigrants crossing our southern border this fiscal year. This is substantially higher than last year’s record 1.7 million encounters, and the year is still not even over. This number represents more than a four-fold increase in illegal immigration compared to FY 2020. And these are only the official statistics, which fail to capture the many got-aways who evaded detection. After two years on the job, you have demonstrated that you have no intention of enforcing our immigration laws.”
Hawley further stated that Mayorkas’s “total abdication of responsibility to secure the border has consequences.” Among those, he cited the fact that a record 78 individuals whose names or on a terror watchlist have entered the country just this year. Senator Hawley added that those individuals are just the ones that are known to us.
Hawley’s letter continued: “This was the predictable result of your open border policies. Your intentional disregard for our country’s immigration laws makes you unfit to remain in office. You should resign.”
Roy Beck, who worked as a journalist covering politics in DC before becoming a policy analyst specializing in immigration and U.S. population issues, founded NumbersUSA to encourage government policies that benefit society by enabling the government to choose the optimal number of authorized immigrants to enter the country. Now the largest grassroots organization focused on immigration reduction in the U.S., NumbersUSA has more than eight million participants including conservatives, liberals and moderates. Its members are encouraged to persuade public officials that reducing immigration numbers toward traditional levels will help current and future generations enjoy a standard of living that isn’t hampered by excessive immigration.
The NumbersUSA report cites reporting from Breitbart which shows that the decision by the Biden Administration to expand its poorly thought-out “catch and release” program to deal with illegal aliens accompanied the dramatic rise in alien encounters.
Additionally, a recent report published by the DHS Inspector General demonstrated that under Secretary Mayorkas, the Biden Administration is letting illegal aliens go free inside the country without giving them tracking numbers, making it difficult to keep tabs on their whereabouts.
The IG report stated:
“We found that Border Patrol did not issue A-numbers for 107 of 384 migrants, most of whom were paroled into the country or issued Notices to Report. Agents did not always assign A-numbers because they were trying to expedite processing and move migrants out of Border Patrol facilities that were over capacity.”
