1/21/2021, Forty-Six, 5.6 million.
No, the line above isn’t a spy code or the punch line to a Tonight Show joke — the line instead exposes everything we need to know about border security and our sovereign integrity.
Since Joe Biden became the 46th President of the United States on 1/21/2021, 5.6 million illegal immigrants have crossed into America through both our northern and southern borders.
While the influx began with the executive orders that Biden issued on his first day in office (with 94 executive actions on immigration within the first 100 days of his administration – including stopping construction of the highly-effective border wall), the longer term, sustained invasion has been directed and facilitated by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Under the Secretary’s ‘leadership’ our borders are NOT secure. In addition to the 5.6 million unlawful entries, which is equivalent to ten times the population of Wyoming, over forty percent of the illegals that were initially detained have disappeared upon being released into the country without so much as an initial hearing. These illegals have now dispersed throughout the country with no way of tracking them. These numbers don’t include the “gotaways,” making it difficult to fully appreciate the magnitude of what this administration has done.
Over 22,300 pounds of fentanyl – enough to kill over 2 billion people -- have been seized. This leads any person with a lick of sense to ask how much is slipping through our porous southern border and being trafficked to our brothers, sisters, and children. According to the CDC, 150 people a day are dying from opioid overdoses. We have lost over 120,000 fellow Americans to fentanyl in the last 18 months.
These numbers are staggering, and it is thus indisputable that Secretary Mayorkas is enabling the greatest human trafficking and drug smuggling operation in our nation’s history – and American families are losing loved ones because of it.
A record number of individuals on the terror watchlist have been stopped attempting to cross the border — over 140 in the last nine months. This total is more than all such encounters in the FY17 – FY20 period combined.
Beyond just the raw statistics, however, are real life consequences to Mayorkas’s colossal dereliction of duty. I personally witnessed the heavy toll that these illegal activities take on our border communities, having spent time in the border town of Yuma, Arizona earlier this year.
The sheer number of illegals have overwhelmed the hospital, food bank, motels, and other services, placing a financial strain of near insolvency on the system and forcing residents to travel to other cities for their own medical needs (such as having babies) because their local facilities are over capacity. As of February of this year, the local hospital had incurred over $26 million dollars in uncompensated care treating illegal aliens, an amount that our federal government has refused to reimburse.
Our fruit and vegetable farmers along the southern border have suffered substantial financial losses, while also dealing with illegals invading their fields. Massive numbers of illegals cross these fields each day, forcing the farmers to destroy their crops in a five-foot radius wherever a footprint is found, effectively crushing their yields. Considering that the Yuma farmers produce a significant portion of America’s fresh food supply, especially in the winter months, these financial losses are impacting all of us and causing additional food cost inflation.
The local law enforcement community is also overworked, overwhelmed, and overrun by the large number of immigrants, telling stories of the horrific auto accidents and smuggling horrors. All of this takes away from their ability to provide services to and protect American citizens, while also creating overcrowding of jails and other detention facilities.
It is clear from the FACTS, that Secretary Mayorkas is not only enabling the drug cartels to spread their poison throughout our country, he is also turning a blind eye as the coyotes traffic women and children, creating a true humanitarian nightmare.
While utterly failing at enforcing our immigration laws, Mayorkas has found the time and resources to stifle our First Amendment rights as American citizens. Within the DHS exists the “Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency” (CISA), which was created to ‘protect pipelines and other critical infrastructure from cyberattacks’ and has now expanded its mission to surveil and censor Americans' speech on social media.
Their ostensible reason for such actions is to address what the Biden administration and Mayorkas define as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” Our Congressional investigations have exposed these censorship activities for what they are – an effort to block anyone who disagrees with their policies from being able to engage in the public debate. Mayorkas, in other words, is just another tyrant following in the footsteps of tyrants throughout history -- those individuals who believe they are the final arbiters of “truth,” and who use their power to silence their political opposition.
We have learned from the Twitter Files, through whistleblower testimony, and from direct information provided by government employees, that DHS actively worked with and intimidated social media companies into suppressing conservative voices.
The scope of the Biden administration (including Mayorkas) censorship regime has now been exposed in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and the Judge’s July 4th decision and injunction blocking certain federal agencies (including the DOJ, FBI, DHS, etc.) from continuing to target Americans. It is clear from Mayorkas’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee last week that he has probably not learned his lesson. We must continue to take him to task and hold him accountable for violating the constitutional rights of American citizens.
The bottom line is this: Mr. Mayorkas is not up to the task of securing our borders and has violated his oath of office almost since the day that he was sworn in. It is also clear that he has used his office and power to silence the voices of anyone that disagrees with the Biden agenda or disputes the so-called “facts” as created by government bureaucrats. He is unfit for office.
We can add one final number to the first line of this article – Zero. That’s the amount of credibility Secretary Mayorkas has after lying to Congress in his Judiciary Committee testimony last week.
Mayorkas’s dishonesty only compounds his incompetency, and he should either resign in disgrace or be removed from his post by Congress.
Congresswoman Harriet Hageman is serving her first term as Wyoming’s at-large Member in the U.S. House of Representatives. She serves on the House Committee on the Judiciary, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and the Committee on Natural Resources.
