On Saturday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox News Live,” Fox News Contributor and former acting ICE Director Thomas Homan reacted to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defending the Biden administration’s approach on the border while he was testifying before Congress earlier in the week by pointing out that the number of encounters at the border in June was several times what the Obama administration — which Mayorkas served as Homeland Security Deputy Secretary during — considered a crisis.
Homan said, [relevant remarks begin around 3:20] “Mayorkas, when he was Deputy Secretary under Obama, when we had a thousand illegal entries a day, Secretary Jeh Johnson called us all in and would say, what the hell is going on? We’ve got a thousand illegal entries. What are we doing about it? It’s a crisis. Now, we’ve got three to four times as many of that. Now, the Deputy Secretary, who is now the Secretary says, this is a success story.”
President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said that when he ran DHS, if there were more than 1,000 border apprehensions in a day, that was considered a bad number and that “I know that a thousand overwhelms the system.” According to Border Patrol’s monthly numbers for June, there were an average of about 3,300 encounters between ports of entry per day, with the total number of encounters averaging about 4,820 per day.
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