Mitt ate his Wheaties yesterday. The Utah Senator delivered a devastating cross-examination of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Tuesday, exposing the Biden administration's quixotic "root causes" fantasy, and attempting to force Mayorkas to assign a letter grade to the current state of border security. When Mayorkas ducked and dodged, Romney interjected his own assessment, giving Biden and Mayorkas a flat 'F'. Here's the clip. If Mayorkas was expecting that he might receive relatively easy treatment from a Senator thought of as a gentlemanly moderate, he expected wrong:
Romney: I just had a note at the outset, Mr. Secretary, that you describe the hemisphere-wide concern and desire to address some of the root causes that encourage people to leave their countries and come to ours. I would note that that is an impossible task. The United States of America is always going to be in a more attractive place for people to come live than in the countries that you're describing. We have a stronger economy. People have much better lives here, much healthier lives and so forth. The idea that we're going to somehow solve the root causes in all of Latin America, of corruption, of the kind of military threats going on, that it's just not going to happen. So we're going to have to secure our border...[Illegal immigrants are] still going to keep coming here. I presume you agree with that. There is going to always be, during our lifetime, a huge demand for people coming into our country from Latin America.
Mayorkas: I do agree with that.
Romney: Okay. And so, all the talk about we need to address root causes, just like, come on, guys, this is taking our eye off the ball, which is we need to have our border secure. Give us a grade. How are we in terms of securing our border, our southern border first? Is it an, A, B, C, D, E, or F in terms of the security of America's southern border? Is it an A or an F? Where do you grade it?
Mayorkas: Senator…
Romney: I'm looking for a letter.
Mayorkas: Senator, it's not so straightforward…
Romney: Sure it is! We know how many people are coming across. Are we doing a great job or is it like still failing?
Mayorkas: Senator, the issue of addressing the root causes is not exclusive…
Romney: I have a question, which is: Can you grade how secure our southern border is? And A, through an F?
Mayorkas: Senator, we are dedicating our resources to achieve the maximum possible effect of them.
Romney: Are we succeeding? Is it an A or is it a B, a D? Where are we in terms of the number of people coming across the border? For instance, we have gaps in a wall. That's like, why would you not want to just complete the wall, for Pete's sake, and complete the fencing and make sure that we're in every way we can securing it, at least physically, as well as the other sources that we have. But you're not willing to give it a grade? I mean, I am: It's an F. It's clearly an F. Do you disagree?...We can't solve poverty here. We can't end crime here in our own country. The idea that we're going to do it in dozens of countries across Latin America and reduce the desire of people to come to America is just not realistic. Let's devote our resources to securing our border.
Things didn't go any smoother for Mayorkas under questioning from other Republican Senators, including this bruising line of questioning from Missouri's Josh Hawley, who wasn't buying the Homeland Security Chief's blame-shifting spin:
Mayorkas says Hawley is "incorrectly attributing" the surge of migrant child trafficking and abuse to his policies.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 18, 2023
Hawley: "Look at the numbers! This massive surge began when you came in to office." pic.twitter.com/RLvZ5le5q1
The pro-illegal immigration crowd fancies itself the 'compassionate' set, but there are horrific human consequences to enabling lawlessness at the border and empowering the cartel traffickers. I'm sure it was uncomfortable for Mayorkas to face some of those consequences, and perhaps his 'incorrect attribution' deflection is how he sleeps at night. Hawley quoted mainstream media reporting to nail Mayorkas to the wall on cause-and-effect, culminating in a resignation call:
Hawley: "We find tens of thousands of children who are forced to work as slaves because of your policies..thousands of children are in physical danger because of what you are doing You should’ve resigned long ago, & if you cannot change course, you should be removed from office." pic.twitter.com/fBSi69yAeu
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 18, 2023
He's referring, in part, to a New York Times investigative report published in February. Its details are appalling:
The Times spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states who described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined. The Times examination also drew on court and inspection records and interviews with hundreds of lawyers, social workers, educators and law enforcement officials...The number of unaccompanied minors entering the United States climbed to a high of 130,000 last year — three times what it was five years earlier — and this summer is expected to bring another wave. These are not children who have stolen into the country undetected. The federal government knows they are in the United States, and the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for ensuring sponsors will support them and protect them from trafficking or exploitation. But as more and more children have arrived, the Biden White House has ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults. Caseworkers say they rush through vetting sponsors. While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.
A new Times piece, published this week, places blame exactly where it belongs (credit where it's due):
Over the past two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have come alone to the United States. Thousands of children have ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws, a recent Times investigation showed. After the article’s publication in February, the White House announced policy changes and a crackdown on companies that hire children. But all along, there were signs of the explosive growth of this labor force and warnings that the Biden administration ignored or missed, The Times has found. Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk. The Labor Department put out news releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals. As the administration scrambled to clear shelters that were strained beyond capacity, children were released with little support to sponsors who expected them to take on grueling, dangerous jobs...In interviews with The Times, officials expressed concern for migrant children but shifted blame for failing to protect them...the White House declined to comment on why the administration did not previously react to repeated signs that migrant children were being widely exploited.
The reality is that they don't actually care, especially since they believe they can get away with whatever they want after a better-than-expected midterm election performance. Their top priority was not helping protect kids, and certainly not to actually protect the border and enforce our sovereignty. Their top priority in this realm was to make the fleeting political problem of bad optics (too many kids in the 'cages' of overwhelmed processing centers) go away. So they cut a bunch of corners to let the children be released to un-vetted or under-vetted adult "sponsors." So what if a bunch of them ended up being exploited through forced labor under awful conditions -- and much, much worse? That's the price of "compassion." What a disgrace. This is that the Biden administration's atrocious border policies have directly wrought, among many other terrible incentives and outcomes. The cartels are now making an estimated $13 billion annually through this trafficking business, up from $500 million in 2018. And apparently, the man charged with running DHS isn't even familiar with a core, well-known staple of the massive trafficking operation. Customs and Border Patrol just released the new March statistics, and they're bad:
NEW: CBP reports there were 191,900 migrant encounters at the southern border in March, including 162,317 encountered by Border Patrol crossing illegally between ports of entry, a 25% increase over February (130,024). CBP attributes the uptick to warmer weather.
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) April 17, 2023
That's more than 6,000 per day, every single day. It's the second-highest total for the month of March in more than two decades, and the numbers are only heading upward again, thanks to warmer weather and the impending cessation of Title 42 removals in early May. Last month marked 25 consecutive months of at least 150,000 migrant encounters at the Southern border. That mark was never surpassed even once during the Trump administration. We are approaching the 6.5 million illegal crossings mark on Joe Biden's watch, including nearly 1.5 million known 'got-aways.' In 2021, Biden claimed "we've now gotten control" of the border crisis. That was a flagrant, unforgivable lie. Romney's 'F' is inarguably apt and thoroughly earned.