Washington Examiner Homeland Security Reporter Anna Giaritelli grilled Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after the secretary refused to recognize the situation at the southern border as a crisis.
“For two years, Secretary Mayorkas has not called this a crisis, and there’s no legal definition for a crisis,” Giaritelli told Fox News anchor Ashley Strohmier. “The latest thing is ‘Does the Border Patrol have operational control of the border.'”
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“Again last week, in three hearings in Congress, the secretary refused to say they had operational control,” she added. “He’s changing language again and again to say, ‘Well, that’s not the goal now. The goal is not to block everyone. It’s to surge massive resources to the border.”
Giaritelli’s comments come in the wake of Mayorkas labeling the border as a “challenge” in a 60 Minutes interview after he was asked if conditions there make it a crisis.
“Even Democrats in the House and the Senate last week, Cory Booker even, pushed him to do more about this, and the senator said, you know, we’re surging resources again,” Giaritelli said. “They did just launch a new operation to go after fentanyl at the border.”
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Mayorkas was the deputy DHS secretary under former President Barack Obama and would have seen the fentanyl crisis coming, she added.
“This shouldn’t be new to him,” she said. “He should have, on day one, you would think, be doing more to avoid getting to this place two years later where it’s just getting worse and worse.
