DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas got his comeuppance Friday. He had issued a memorandum last September limiting the deportation of illegal aliens to certain criminals, national security risks, and recent border crossers. He explicitly said in the memo being in the country illegally is not a reason for deportation. In fact, he said if somebody’s been here illegally a long time, or if they’re young, they should be allowed to stay. Then he went on TV to brag about how he single-handedly “fundamentally changed immigration enforcement” in the country.
On Friday, a federal judge in Texas threw out the memo, ruling Mayorkas had changed immigration law on his own, when only Congress has the power to legislate. The judge also said Mayorkas broke the law by proclaiming all this on his own without going through the normal rulemaking process that gives affected states and the public due notice and opportunity to comment. DHS can appeal the court’s decision, but the judge’s ruling is a welcome rebuke to our lawless DHS Secretary who thinks he can do anything he wants on immigration.
In a previous commentary [4/28/22], I listed numerous policy changes Mayorkas and the Biden administration have made to open the border. There are others I didn’t mention – no longer detaining criminal illegal aliens for deportation when Congress said they must be detained; discontinuing the detention of families with children; ending large-scale worksite arrests; pausing an operation that targeted sex offenders (Operation Talon); and shielding pregnant women and victims of crime from deportation entirely.
In addition the Biden administration is pushing free collegefor illegal aliens and sending border patrol agents into Mexico to work with asylum lawyers and shelter operators to identify sympathetic cases, like single mothers, to bring into the U.S. To top it all off, the Biden administration’s streamlined asylum claim procedures went into effect at the border last week. Critics say immigration courts are cut out of the process and low-level bureaucrats will simply approve most asylum claims.
All of this is being done in the name of racial equity or, as I call it, racial payback. Mayorkas has called equity (equal outcomes) the “core founding principle” of our country – which it’s not – and he’s willing to break the law to achieve it. The executive branch is supposed to faithfully execute the laws, not pretend it’s Congress or rewrite statutes willy-nilly anytime it feels like it.
Mayorkas reminds me of the German Leftist who said in a video at the start of Europe’s migration crisis that Germany has existential guilt because of what it did in World Wars I and II and, therefore, Germany must hand its country over to somebody else so they can do something else with it. That’s just crazy. You won’t have anywhere to live for very long if you think like that.
What we have in the Biden administration’s open borders policies is the diversity narrative run amok. White people are guilty of you-name-it, so we must open the borders and let other people get their fair share – equity – no matter who it hurts. No matter how many women are raped en route, how many Americans die of fentanyl overdoses, or how many terrorists are coming across the border. And, no matter how many times the Biden administration ignores the will of Congress and rewrites the laws to its own liking.
If equity is your game, what will it take to satisfy you? How much will be enough? By what objective standards? To what ultimate end? If you have a bottomless pit of racial resentment like Alejandro Mayorkas, and think the hate and the punishment are just supposed to go on forever, without end, there’s a job waiting for you in the Biden administration. No Capitol Hill experience required.
