NBC News Debunks Mayorkas ‘Border Is Closed’ Claim

US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas arrives to testify during a US Senate
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe’s Biden’s border chief, has repeatedly claimed that “the border is closed” — and now one of the main establishment TV networks finally took the time to refute his claim.

NBC News’s Julia Ainsley reported June 2:

When he took office, President Joe Biden loosened rules at the border, letting children without parents cross — but agents were supposed to expel all other undocumented migrants.

The policy allows the Biden administration to say, “The border is closed.”

In reality, the border is not closed. Under Biden, the determination of who stays and who goes has become a lottery with winners and losers.

The news segment was not produced as a “Fact-Check” of Mayorkas, who is not mentioned in the article, even though he is the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

But it is a veiled criticism of Mayorkas for repeatedly claiming the border is closed.

“The border is closed,” Mayorkas told an ill-informed Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) in a May 26 hearing.

“The border is closed,” Mayorkas told a roomful of powerless White House reporters on May 31.

A DHS official backtracked slightly on Mayorkas’s claim, telling NBC that:

The Biden administration has made it clear that our borders are not open, people should not make the dangerous journey, and individuals and families are subject to border restrictions, including expulsion.

Mayorkas, who insists the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants,” uses small-scale exemptions in immigration law to welcome large-scale inflows of economic migrants.

In April, Mayorkas’s supposedly closed-border policies — or “not open” policies — helped at least 60,000 job seekers to cross the southern border, including illegal “got-aways,” youths claiming to be victimized children, adults with young children, and deported migrants who want to join their migrant children who remained to apply for asylum.

Mayorkas also approved 22,000 extra H-2B visa workers, removed Trump-era curbs on white-collar visa workers, renewed work permits for at least 100,000 Haitian migrants, began awarding work permits to many thousands of Venezuelan migrants, and continued processing the roughly one million legal migrants who are allowed into the United States each year.

Not all migrants get Mayorkas’s welcome.

Many are quickly selected for return to Mexico, as others are allowed to blend into U.S. society via an unpredictable, semi-random process. “The determination of who stays and who goes has become a lottery with winners and losers,” NBC News noted, adding:

While they sat on the curb, waiting to find out what U.S. officials would do with them, 15 single adult men who had been caught crossing the border a few days earlier were released to a nearby shelter, where they waited for flights and buses that would take them to cities across the U.S.

Mayorkas and his allies describe his half-open border as “humane.” Yet those “humane” policies are causing huge damage to many migrants because Mayorkas does not have the public or legal support to welcome the many migrants who hope to enter via Mayorkas’s small side doors.

On June 3, the Associated Press described a migrant who lost Mayorkas’s lottery after mortgaging her home to pay a coyote for transport to the border:

[Alvina Jerónimo Pérez ] put the house up as collateral to pay the smuggler $7,700. “The deal was that when we had arrived there, we were going to pay that money and they would return (the deed), but it wasn’t possible,” she said.

…

In March 2020, she and her daughter Yessenia, then 14, left Tizamarte. Three weeks later they were caught entering Texas. They were deported a week after that.

When Jerónimo realized they would be sent back, she cried. “I thought of everything the trip had cost me. I asked myself ‘What am I going to do?’ I’ve lost everything.”

“Jerónimo’s story is similar to that of thousands of Guatemalans who scramble to gather the money needed to migrate to the United States,” AP added.

But the distraught losers in Mayorkas’s lottery — and the dead lost in the desert — still serve Mayorkas and his pro-migration allies on Wall Street.

They help to distract the establishment media from the growing number of migrant workers and consumers who are being extracted from poor countries to force down Americans’ wages and drive up Americans’ rents.

The federal government has long allowed migrants to sneak past border guards while it also reassures the anxious public by promising tighter border security. This two-track policy strips wealth from working Americans and from heartland regions by quietly encouraging low-wage migrants to gamble their lives in a chaotic Hunger Games trek of loans, coyotes, cartels, rape, deserts, storms, border laws, barriers, rescuers, transport, judges, and cheap labor employers.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.

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