GOP House Committee Report Accuses Mayorkas of Emboldening Cartels at Border

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas prepares to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee on Capitol Hill on Nov. 15, 2022. Chip Somodevilla/ Getty Images

The GOP-controlled House Homeland Security Committee released a report on Sept. 7 accusing Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of having “emboldened cartels, criminals and America’s enemies.”

In a 62-page report, the committee went in-depth on the problems at the southern border and pinpointed them on Mr. Mayorkas.

The report accuses Mr. Mayorkas of allowing for the cartels to seize the southern border. The committee blames the Biden administration undoing the Trump administration’s strict border policies in addition to enacting its own policies, leading to millions of illegal immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The massive increase in the number of people now traveling up through Mexico on their way to the Southwest border represents a historic business opportunity for the cartels, as each person is someone off whom they can profit,” states the report.

Additionally, the committee says the overwhelming flow of illegal immigrants across the southwest border has caused Border Patrol to shift its resources to “processing, transporting, and releasing unprecedented numbers of illegal aliens, rather than patrolling the border,” thereby making it easier for the cartels to exploit this disadvantage.

Moreover, the cartels send illegals to one part of the southwest border in order to trick Border Patrol into focusing on one part of the border, allowing the cartels to enter the United States through an unpatrolled area of the border, according to the committee. This tactic, as one expert testified to the committee, is called “flooding the zone.” The committee remarks that this strategy “has been repeated day in and day out ever since Mayorkas implemented his open-borders policies, a fact confirmed by senior Border Patrol officials.”

A Lucrative Time for Cartels

The report notes how much the cartels have been profiting during the Biden administration.

It cites that although cartels raked in at least $500 million during the Trump administration, as of 2021, they have gotten between $2 billion and $6 billion. The committee cites reports of illegal aliens paying thousands of dollars to be smuggled into the United States, with Chinese nationals paying tens of thousands of dollars more than those coming from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

Furthermore, the report blames Mr. Mayorkas for allowing cartel crime to flourish at the southern border and move into all 50 states.

“As Mayorkas and Biden’s border crisis has continued to expand, so has the reach and influence of these groups,” states the report, which alleges the cartels make the illegal aliens they transfer across the border do so with illegal drugs in order to pay off their debts to the cartels. The report paints a dark picture of human trafficking of illegal immigrants, especially children.

“The cartels’ mass use of debt bondage, and the complex systems devised to make it a reality, are a unique consequence of Mayorkas’ open-borders policies,” according to the report.

The committee goes into detail about stash houses used by the cartels as part of the trafficking of illegal immigrants, a practice that “has exploded on Mayorkas’ watch.”

The report claims that “the crime and chaos caused by [transnational criminal organizations] has been exacerbated by Mayorkas’ policies.” Examples include drug trafficking, which the committee says “is booming on Biden and Mayorkas’ watch.”

“Under Mayorkas and Biden’s policies, no community is safe from the expanding reach of the cartels and the drugs they are trafficking,” added the report.

Mayorkas Testimony

In response to an inquiry about the report, the Department of Homeland Security referred The Epoch Times to Mr. Mayorkas’s comments in front of the House Judiciary Committee on July 26.

The remarks include him saying, “We seized nearly 2 million pounds of narcotics last fiscal year. Operations Blue, Lotus and Four Horsemen alone stopped nearly 10,000 pounds of fentanyl from the U.S., led to 284 arrests, and yielded invaluable insights into the transnational criminal organizations wreaking this death and destruction on our communities.”

“We are taking it to the transnational criminal organizations, the cartels that peddle in death and destruction, to an unprecedented degree,” he said. “We have arrested more criminals involved in cartel activity than in the prior several years.”

While not as much of a problem as it is in Mexico, cartel and gang violence is still an issue in the United States, according to the report, which also alleges that the infamous gang MS-13 has “thrive[d] on Mayorkas’ watch.”

Additionally, the committee laments that “the historic influx of [unaccompanied children] is another area in which Mayorkas’ policies have uniquely benefitted the gang, and almost certainly served to swell its ranks.”

The report claims that “simple math makes clear that Mayorkas and the Biden administration’s policies have almost certainly brought a flood of new potential recruits right to MS-13’s doorstep” thanks to the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children who have crossed the southwest border.

The committee also sounds the alarm in that “the Biden-Mayorkas border crisis represents an unmitigated national security threat.

“It is well documented that cartels, human smugglers, and violent gangs have taken full advantage of Mayorkas and Biden’s open-borders policies in pursuit of their malicious ambitions—but they are not the only ones.”

Moving Personnel

Moreover, the report criticizes Mr. Mayorkas “due massive influx of illegal aliens on [his] watch,” for shifting Customs and Border Protection personnel from their usual jobs to do administrative duties. This has included moving border patrol agents away from the U.S.-Canada border to the southwest border; reassigning air marshals from protecting the skies to the southern border; and reassigning agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the Department of Homeland Security’s main investigative division, to the border.

Regarding the reallocation of personnel, a DHS official did not deny the claims other than to say that “CBP currently has more than 1,000 Border Patrol Processing Coordinators deployed to the Sectors, more in training ” and that “there are a further 2,600 contractors and support personnel. 

“All of this is designed to help return agents to their patrol duties in the field. ”

At the end of the day, stated the committee, “Mayorkas and Biden’s policies have emboldened and enriched the cartels, ceded control of America’s sovereign Southwest border to these organizations, and jeopardized the safety and security of individuals and communities across this country in the process.”

“The facts are indeed clear—the cartels have been the greatest winners from Mayorkas and Biden’s open-borders policies,” added the committee, which said it is going to “focus in even greater depth on the various human costs of Mayorkas’ radical agenda, many of them stemming from the unprecedented control cartels now exercise over the United States’ sovereign Southwest border.”

While cartels, both human and drug trafficking, and other border- and immigration-related issues predate the Biden administration, it is the Biden administration, especially Mr. Mayorkas, that has exacerbated those problems due to their own policies, a committee aide told The Epoch Times.