Former US Acting-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Chad Wolf has described the country’s border as “anything but secure,” arguing that “there is no operational control over” it.
In an interview with Fox News, he said that he and his supporters “continue to see month after month really astronomically high numbers, over 200,000 illegal [border] apprehensions over 900,000 got away this fiscal year that’s ending in about a month from now.”
The ex-acting DHS secretary pointed out that “when you have that much unlawful and uncontrolled migration coming across that border, you have no control over it. You don’t know who’s entering and who’s not”.
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He suggested that “the numbers continue to get worse with the Biden administration because they simply are not doing one fundamental thing and that is enforcing the law and bringing deterrence into that system.” According to Wolf, “if individuals are not afraid of getting caught because they are getting released into the country and never removed, guess what, you will continue to see the numbers that we do every day.”
When asked about Republican governors, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, being berated by Democrats who claimed that the governors illegally move migrants out of their states to liberal cities, Wolf underscored that the real matter is what to do with overflowing shelters.
“The question though, for instance in the state of Texas, is DHS, in many instances, runs out of bed space, runs out of shelters to house these migrants in. So what they simply do is they release them on to the streets of El Paso or Brownsville or McAllen,” he noted.
The former acting DHS secretary quoted Abbott as saying that “hundreds, maybe even thousands of migrants are not safe by just sleeping on city streets and wandering the streets, so instead we’re going to bus them to New York and Chicago and DC and elsewhere because the federal government has simply washed their hands of the matter.”
Wolf accused the Biden administration of “removing less and less individuals,” adding that he thinks “they are at an all-time low in the amount of individuals they are targeting and arresting, because at the end of the day, the Biden administration don’t [sic] like to enforce border security, and they don’t like to enforce immigration law.”
He also lashed out at Vice President Kamala Harris, who was previously called a "border czar" by the White House, slamming her as “a complete disaster, not only for the root causes.” Wolf added that although Harris is a border czar, he is “not really sure what her job is at the end of the day.”
"The issue now is that you have hundreds of thousands of folks coming from about 140 different countries because they know what the rest of Americans know is that the border is wide open and there is very little control over it today,” he concluded.
US Border Apprehensions on Record High
The remarks came a few days after the Washington Examiner cited unnamed sources as saying that President Joe Biden’s stance on immigration and the policy decisions taken by him on the issue have had catastrophic consequences, with unprecedented numbers of migrants dying while attempting to cross the US-Mexico border illegally.
One source told the news outlet that more than 800 bodies may be recovered at the southern border by the end of September, while the US federal agency Customs and Border Protection in turn announced last week that southern border apprehensions have already exceeded 2 million this fiscal year, surpassing the figures of 2021, which saw 1.66 million apprehensions.
The crisis on the US southern border began almost immediately after Biden took office in January 2021 and revoked Trump-era immigration policies, including the 45th president’s signature border wall and the “Remain in Mexico” program. Other measures, including promises to “restore and expand” the US asylum system, and to potentially provide a “path to citizenship” for more than 11 million illegal immigrants already residing in the US, led to a further surge in entry attempts.
The Republicans have repeatedly lambasted Biden for his administration’s “open border policies,” pledging to roll out a plan to enhance border security and reduce illegal immigration if they win the November midterms.