Proud to Be A Democrat

In the three years since, with record numbers of migrants arriving at the border, Mayorkas has had to testify before Congress twenty-seven times, far more than any other Cabinet member. “Get the popcorn,” Mark Green, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told a group of conservative donors last spring, before one of the hearings. “It’s going to be fun.” He went on to accuse Mayorkas of the “intentional destruction of our country through the open southern border.” Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the homeland-security adviser at the White House, told me that Mayorkas “did not anticipate, as none of us could have anticipated, how savage the attacks would be personally.”…

On February 6th, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives held a vote to impeach Mayorkas—the first time Congress had attempted to charge a Cabinet secretary since 1876. Every Democrat in the chamber, along with three Republicans, opposed the resolution, but they were still short a vote. At around 6:50 P.M., Al Green, a seventy-six-year-old Democrat from Texas, was wheeled into the chamber wearing a gown and socks. He’d come from the hospital, where he was recovering after surgery on a blocked intestine. “I believe him to be a good, decent man,” he said of Mayorkas. “I don’t want his reputation to be besmirched.” The Republicans were stuck. With the vote now tied, at two hundred and fifteen, they needed all their members to be present to pass the resolution, but one was missing: Steve Scalise, the House Majority Leader, who has blood cancer, was back in his district, in Louisiana, recovering from a stem-cell transplant.

At the House dais, Speaker Mike Johnson held the gavel, looking stricken. Several Republicans swarmed a member of their party who’d voted against impeachment, trying to pressure him to switch sides. “Order! Order!” the Democrats yelled. A little before seven o’clock, Johnson conceded defeat. Standing off to the side was Mark Green, of the Homeland Security Committee, who, hours earlier, had described Mayorkas as a “reptile with no balls.” The failed impeachment “frustrated” him, he said. “But we’ll see it back again.”…

Contending with a border crisis has become a political rite of passage for American Presidents. Obama dealt with one in 2014; Trump had his in 2019. But the current moment is unique. In the past, authorities were overwhelmed by migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Central Americans, however, no longer make up the majority of border crossers—their numbers, though still large, have been eclipsed by arrivals from South America, Asia, and Africa. Until very recently, the Darién Gap, a treacherous stretch of jungle that straddles Colombia and Panama, served as a natural buffer limiting migration from South America. Only eleven thousand people, on average, crossed it each year. In 2023, five hundred thousand made the journey. A decade ago, Mayorkas pointed out, “a third of the Venezuelan population wasn’t seeking refuge in multiple countries.”

The U.S. immigration system encompasses far more than securing the two thousand miles of border separating the country from Mexico, and, under other circumstances, the Administration’s track record might have earned it plaudits. Legal immigration is now higher than it was before the Trump Presidency. The refugee system, which was hobbled by Trump, is on pace to resettle more people this year than at any time in the past three decades. Away from the border, immigration arrests that result in deportations are also down, in part because of a series of directives from Mayorkas that have emphasized discretion. “You don’t hear about ICE picking up grandmothers,” he told me. “Even during Obama, that was a huge issue. We have changed the landscape.

Most of the new arrivals to the U.S. are seeking asylum, but few of them qualify. Eligibility depends on strict types of identity-based persecution, related to someone’s religion, political beliefs, or race, among other factors. But, because Congress has failed to open other channels for legal immigration, travelling to the U.S.-Mexico border and claiming asylum has become a migrant’s best shot at entering the country. Mayorkas, who for much of his career has defended asylum, is now in the uncomfortable position of conceding that the system no longer works. “Ten thousand people at the border in one day is not an asylum system,” he told me…

On the wall of Mayorkas’s office is a photograph of his late parents at a garden party. His mother stands in the foreground, gazing at the camera. His father, wearing a tan suit, is laughing in the background. The two of them, both Jewish and both only children, met in Havana in the early nineteen-fifties. Mayorkas’s father, Charles, who was known as Nicky, was the son of Turkish and Polish immigrants who left Europe after the First World War. Mayorkas’s mother, Anita Gabor, was Romanian, and had lost two grandparents and seven uncles in the Holocaust. She arrived in Cuba after her family fled to France during the rise of the Nazis.

As a boy, Mayorkas joked with his mother that he would one day write a sitcom about “how our family wasn’t like the other families.” They blended Cuban and Central European traditions—paella and potato soups, conversations in Spanish, English, and Romanian. Anita spoke five languages and read widely. “You’d walk into our living room and to the left was a collection of books about antisemitism,” Mayorkas said. “The fragility of life as a Jewish person was something extraordinarily present in our home.”…

… After the war in Ukraine began, large numbers of Ukrainians had started gathering in northern Mexico. Mayorkas and his advisers came up with a plan to grant them entry using the Administration’s powers of “parole,” a Presidential authority, in place since the Eisenhower era, that allows the government to bring in vulnerable people in moments of international emergency. Their legal status would be temporary, but they’d get authorization to work. “Almost immediately, the gatherings at ports of entry dissipated, and people began accessing the program,” Mayorkas told me. “We then applied it to the Venezuelans.”

The idea was to manage the flow of people to the border, not simply to fight it. The government would open legal pathways for some migrants to gain entry to the U.S., but it would refuse asylum to anyone who attempted to enter the country by crossing the border between ports of entry. D.H.S. identified the fastest-growing populations of new arrivals—Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans, and Nicaraguans—and built a parole process around them. It would allow as many as thirty thousand members of these nationalities to enter the U.S. legally each month. At the same time, the government had expanded access to a scheduling app, called CBP One, that migrants could use once they reached central Mexico; this would grant them an appointment at a port of entry, where they had a chance to get paroled into the U.S.

In the past year, some four hundred and fifty thousand people have used CBP One to make an appointment at the border. Another three hundred and sixty thousand have used the program reserved for the four nationalities. At the same time, between the middle of last May, when Title 42 was lifted, and the end of January, D.H.S. deported roughly half a million migrants, including some ninety thousand who crossed the border with family members.

Jason Houser, the former ICE official, had been critical of the White House’s handling of the situation in Del Rio. “We had twenty-five flights to Haiti on Title 42,” he told me. “No one got to seek asylum.” But the parole process, he said, was the only sensible response to what is happening at the border. In the first months of the program, encounters at the border with migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua dropped ninety per cent. What was especially striking, Houser said, was that some of the same Haitians the Administration had expelled in 2021 were now applying for parole…

On February 13th, a special election was held in New York to fill Santos’s seat, which Democrats were poised to flip. While the returns came in, and Republicans guarded their dwindling majority in the chamber, the Speaker convened another vote to impeach Mayorkas. As before, the charges failed to identify any concrete acts of wrongdoing. There was still no chance of conviction in the Senate. But this time Scalise was in attendance, and two Democrats—one with COVID, the other stuck in an airport in Florida—were not. The resolution passed. History was made, abjectly.

Biden called it a “blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship.” Schumer dismissed it as a “sham.” Mayorkas kept quiet. When I reached him two days later, he was flying to a security conference in Munich. “Our work continues,” he told me. “The threats we face are real.” ♦

The day after a failed House impeachment vote, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called the allegations that Republicans have against him baseless and said he will not consider stepping aside. pic.twitter.com/J7UPjU50Oc

— The Associated Press (@AP) February 7, 2024

Republicans are right that the country has an immigration crisis, but their grandstanding move against Alejandro Mayorkas attacked the Democrat trying hardest to fix it, @IgnatiusPost writes: https://t.co/LKp2IXx99p

— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) February 25, 2024