Jeh Johnson: ‘Our Borders Are Not Open to Illegal Migration’

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson declared that “our borders are not open to illegal migration” in an interview on Thursday’s broadcast of “The Lead” on CNN.

Johnson stated “the numbers [of illegal immigrants] are actually way down from where they were last summer when we had that unprecedented spike. We put a very aggressive campaign in place to address it, the numbers fell off dramatically. The numbers in the Rio Grande Valley in particular, South Texas, are the lowest they have been in almost two years and a point that needs to be emphasized about the executive actions that we announced…is that a large component of them is border security.” 

He continued “the president has said, you have the opportunity to come forward and submit to a criminal background check and be accountable. But as to the future, we are prioritizing the removal of those who come here in the future because our borders are not open to illegal migration.”

Johnson concluded “what we have done is simple common sense. We have a broken immigration system. We were hoping to have Congress as our partners in fixing that, but we waited over a year for Congress to act. in the meantime, we identified a number of things that, through executive action, we could do ourselves to fix the system, to deal with the tremendous backlog of cases, to deal with border security in the future. We’re beefing up border security in the future.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett