Republican lawmakers lambasted Alejandro Mayorkas after he eventually revealed that several thousand illegal immigrants from the makeshift camp in Del Rio, Texas, had actually been let into the United States, while also admitting that not all of them had been tested for COVID-19.
Over the course of the weekend, many GOP politicians spoke out about the rather controversial statements of the head of the DHS, including Senator Lindsey Graham, who expressed the opinion that Mayorkas "needs to resign."
"He’s completely incompetent. The border is not closed. It’s been surrendered," Graham said in an interview with Fox News. "I think the most inhumane thing going on right now in America is the men and women of the Border Patrol have been completely abandoned, demagogued, scapegoated and treated like dirt by elected officials and the Democratic Party and this administration."
Representative Lance Gooden of Texas has also chastised Mayorkas for his handling of the border situation in a series of tweets.
Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, also slammed Mayorkas, purportedly equating the release of untested Haitians to an instance in which a mother claimed her child was denied boarding on a flight from Colorado to New Jersey for not wearing a mask.
"Two-year-olds are getting forced off planes for not wearing masks while Mayorkas just released 12,000+ illegals into the country without so much as a COVID test," she wrote on Twitter.
The former senior adviser to President Trump, Stephen Miller, echoed the words of fellow Republicans, stating that Mayorkas "is truly, deeply sociopathic."
"Meanwhile, our open border is driving down working class wages, overrunning our hospitals, and poisoning our children with deadly drugs," he added in a post on Twitter.
The chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, commented on the part of the DHS chief's interview where he tried to downplay the scale of the crisis on the southern border, stating that migration is "nothing new" and that he would not categorize the recent arrivals as a "flood."
In another tweet, she also added that it has been more than eight months since the influx erupted, and rhetorically asked: "Could this administration be any more incompetent?"
At the same time, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York blamed Joe Biden for the crisis on the border.
In his turn, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas criticized what he called Biden's "Bizarro-world rules," referring to the vaccination issue with the migrants.
In the same interview, Mayorkas was asked why the authorities eventually failed to stop the immigrants from entering the country, to which he replied that the officials "encountered them as they gathered – they assembled in that one location in Del Rio, Texas," and then the administration "applied the laws."
The DHS secretary was further confronted by the host, Chris Wallace, on why the US government did not build some sort of fencing across the border, the lack of which eventually made the situation look like "a highway that allows them to cross the Rio Grande."
"It is the policy of this administration – we do not agree with the building of the wall. The law provides that individuals can make a claim for humanitarian relief," the DHS chief stated. "That is actually one of our proudest traditions."
Earlier on Monday, Trump blasted the statements of the Homeland Security secretary, saying that the US is now "a Nation humiliated like never before," and that with "millions of people" not masked or vaccinated "pouring in," the nation "is being destroyed!”
In addition, the Biden administration's approach to the issue was criticized by a union spokesman for border patrol agents, saying that Biden "throws them under the bus" by pursuing them for allegedly using whips to disperse migrants.
According to media reports, many Haitian migrants who have been camped out in South and Central American countries for long periods of time say they now believe it is time to make the journey to the US because they see President Biden's immigration policies as more favorable than former President Trump's.
The repercussions over Mayorkas' remarks come as the flow of Haitian migrants trying to reach the US continues. Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has been devastated by two massive earthquakes, one in 2010 and the other in August of this year, the latter killing over 2,000 people. Moreover, political instability has plagued the Caribbean nation, which was exacerbated when President Jovenal Moise was killed in July.