The Biden administration and Republicans are gridlocked over the cause and solution to the immigration and fentanyl crises and have shown no signs of a deal on the horizon to permanently resolve either issue ahead of the 2024 election.
In separate comments made 2,000 miles apart Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Senate Republicans espoused a desire to remedy the nation's deadliest drug epidemic and historically high levels of migration at the border. However, neither indicated meaningful talks or a bipartisan solution was possible.
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Without naming names, Mayorkas called out lawmakers who he said have claimed that the immigration crisis between the ports of entry at the southern border was the result of immigrants smuggling fentanyl into the country.
"Some have used the border as a cudgel and conflated migration and the trafficking of fentanyl," Mayorkas said during a fireside chat at The Aspen Institute's security summit in Colorado on Thursday.
In Washington, four GOP senators gathered at the Capitol to call attention to 85,000 unaccompanied minor children released by the federal government to adult sponsors, only to fall off the government's radar following their release.
“How many more children need to be lost before the Biden administration finally agrees to work with us on a bipartisan basis to address this problem?” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) Thursday. "I've wondered as a border state senator, what's it going to take to get the attention of the Biden administration to finally do something about the Biden border crisis?”
Both parties voiced differing views on the state of the border.
Republicans blamed Mayorkas's kneejerk rollbacks of Trump-era policies as having caused the number of illegal immigrant apprehensions to spike from 70,000 per month to 200,000 and higher each month, which occurred as countries ended travel restrictions in 2021 and 2022.
President Joe Biden and Mayorkas have walked back Trump programs, such as the "Remain in Mexico" policy, Safe Third Country agreements, and broader use of federal immigration detention facilities.
Mayorkas said Thursday that the 70 million displaced people following World War II paled in comparison to the 112 million displaced people now and that it was a leading reason that more than 5 million people have been encountered at the U.S. border under Biden.
"Our hemisphere is by no means exempted from that extraordinary migration, that extraordinary level of people departing their countries of origin for a better life," Mayorkas said.
Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) accused the White House of having a "lack of seriousness" regarding the border.
"President Biden put out his budget, and while he increased a number of things in his budget, Homeland Security, the Department of Homeland Security, which is actually the department that is about keeping Americans safe, was the only department to receive an actual cut of 1%," Britt said.
"I am not interested in border management. I am interested in border security," Britt added. "We've got to make sure that people understand in this nation that we're not going to reward you for lawlessness, but that's exactly what Biden and his failed policies are trying to do."
The Biden administration has implemented several new immigration programs that it said are meant to push people outside the United States to seek permission to enter before embarking on the journey — one way to deter illegal immigration proactively.
Mayorkas expanded the Obama-era family reunification program, humanitarian parole, and is in the process of speeding up refugee processing.
"Our hope is that our model of incentivizing people to apply for relief before they take the journey and delivering a consequence regime if they don’t avail themselves of those pathways works and keeps a cap, if you will, on the number of people we encounter under very dangerous circumstances," Mayorkas said. "Fundamentally, we need the system fixed."
The Biden administration has pushed Congress countless times to address both legal immigration and illegal immigration solutions.
Mayorkas touted a 65% decline in the number of people that federal law enforcement have encountered at the southern border since public health pandemic policy Title 42 was walked back in mid-May.
Republicans, and even some Democrats, had pleaded with the Biden administration not to end Title 42, they said, because it would lead to a surge of people over the border. That prediction, which even the Department of Homeland Security warned could happen, has not manifested — rather, the opposite.
Despite the decline in illegal crossings, Republicans have accused the Biden administration of a bait and switch for how it has mass-paroled hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the U.S. at the ports of entry.
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"Rather than securing the border, what the Biden administration's approach is to process migrants across the border and into the interior of the United States to never, never be heard from again," Cornyn said. "And more recently, just in order to make the numbers look better than they really are, they've been releasing people who aren't even claiming asylum into the United States."
The Trump administration released roughly 1 million illegal immigrants into the U.S. during its four years in office through a different process. To date, the Biden administration has allowed more than 2 million people into the country via the southern border.