(WASHINGTON) — Outgoing Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who for four years has been a target for Republican criticism, said that national tragedies should not be used for “political disagreements.”
“There are people that lobby vitriol in public, and have relationships in private, that are quite inconsistent with the vitriol,” he told ABC News in an exit interview from his office at DHS headquarters in Washington.
“Times of tragedy should drive unity of effort and unity of care, whether that be the hurricanes and tornadoes of Helene and Milton, or whether that be the wildfires in California, or whether that be the tragic death of 14 individuals on in the early morning hours of January 1, and not be ammunition for political disagreement,” he said. “We’ve got to get back to a place where we can disagree and we can unify when the American people need it.”
He said his hope is that “we can disagree with civility and mutual respect.”
Mayorkas’ time as DHS secretary saw one crisis after another, including big increases in migrants crossing the southern border illegally to an unprecedented threat environment to an evolving cybersecurity landscape.
Through it all, he said remains proud of the department’s work.
“I am on the ground with the people of this department in in times of success, in times of tragedy,” Mayorkas said.
He personally traveled to funerals for Border Patrol agents who died in the line of duty, recalling how at one he was moved by the outpouring of honor and respect.
“… along the highway in Texas,” he said, “one saw police officers, firefighters, citizens standing outside of their cars at bus stops all along the multi-mile stretch of highway, saluting the car and the motorcade. Incredibly powerful message of the impact of our work and the impact of people doing the work on the broader community.”
For Mayorkas, who spent 11 years working at DHS, serving as secretary was the honor of a lifetime.
“I love this job. I love the mission. I love the people who perform it, and it’s going to be very hard to leave,” he said.
Regrets, he said, are “unproductive.”
“If I said no, there’s nothing we could have done better, I would be basically saying that we achieved perfection, and that obviously is not the case,” he said. “In any large, multifaceted organization such as an administration, there are disagreements over policy and practice, and decisions are made, and then we all march as one in executing.”
He maintained he is leaving DHS in better shape than how he found it, and, he insists, that starts with the border.
“We have built and delivered a model where the border is more secure now than it was in 2019 and we have safe, lawful and orderly pathways that have delivered humanitarian relief to people in need and cutting out the smugglers, we have modernized the system of border security and humanitarian relief in unprecedented ways,” he says of the department’s work, noting the border has seen the lowest daily average of migrants in December since July 2020.
Mayorkas said that the incoming Trump administration’s critical rhetoric “misses everything that we have tried to do, and I view it as rhetoric that is a political and not substantive.”
“For example, they speak of focusing on public safety and national security threats when they talk about mass deportations,” he said. “Well, they speak of it as something new, when in fact, that is a continuation of precisely what we’ve done.”
Mayorkas also said that the incoming administration will have access to “tools at their disposal that were not tools that we had at our disposal,” meaning potentially increased funding from Congress.
In June 2024, President Joe Biden signed a series of executive actions on the border, that DHS says curbed illegal immigration by nearly 55%.
When asked by ABC News why the Biden administration didn’t act sooner to take the actions that President Joe Biden ordered in June 2024, during the presidential campaign, he said there was “bipartisan pressure” to not lift the order established by then-President Donald Trump to curb migrants at the border due to a public health emergency, known as Title 42.
“Everyone expected that when we lifted it, calamity would ensue, 18,000 encounters, 20,000 encounters in a day, from on both sides of the aisle and that calamity did not occur,” he said. “And then we turned to Congress for funding, more ICE officers, more Border Patrol agents, more Office of Field Operations personnel, more immigration judges denied. We went to Congress again, again, denied. We entered the bipartisan Senate negotiations, mission accomplished, political torpedo, no legislative reform,” he said, noting how how then-candidate Donald Trump told congressional Republicans to block the measure. “And then the president acted,” he said of President Biden.
Mayorkas also became the first Cabinet-level secretary to be impeached because, after House Republicans claimed his failed to handle the immigration issue.
“It should never have occurred. And I wish that the members of Congress had followed the law, and if they had, it would not have occurred,” he said. “And it’s unfortunate when the law is overridden by politics.”
He also said the country is in a “heightened threat environment,” and to look no further than what happened on January 1st in New Orleans as an example.
Mayorkas said that the department under his watch is helping state and local governments take a public health approach to stopping mass attacks.
“If one takes a look at the assailant in Buffalo, the assailant in Uvalde, Texas, the assailant at the July 4 parade outside, in a suburb outside of Chicago, those three assailants exhibited signs manifested externally, signs of radicalizing to violence for different reasons,” he said, adding if someone notices them, the assailant can get help.
Mayorkas said he also has focused on positioning DHS to take on the challenge posed by artificial intelligence by personally recruiting people to come work on the issue and setting up the AI Safety Board — a collection of private and public partners who help shape the department’s AI policy.
The DHS secretary oversees 22 agencies with more than 260,000 employees – on issues ranging from the border to federal disaster management to the Secret Service.
He said that he wishes he could stay on to see reforms being made to the Secret Service after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July, which he described as an agency “failure.”
“Let me be clear, I consider the Secret Service to be the best protective service in the world. Success is when nothing occurs, and there are countless examples of that success,” he said.
Mayorkas, who said he plans to stay on the job until Monday at noon, told ABC News he has had “substantive and very productive and very collegial” conversations with Trump’s pick to be the new DHS secretary, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.
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