Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, has admitted that more than 12,000 Haitian migrants previously detained at Texas’ Del Rio bridge had been freed on the improbable condition that they appear in court.
Mayorkas was asked on ‘Fox News Sunday’ by presenter Chris Wallace how many of the thousands of migrants pictured waiting to be processed at the bridge had been released.
“I guess it’s about 10,000… 12,000,” Mayorkas estimated. Around 3,000 others have been held, although an immigration official conceded that the number of people let in to the United States might rise as their cases are examined.
“It may possibly be higher.
And the number of results might be considerably higher.
“What we do is we obey the law as it was written by Congress,” Mayorkas explained.
However, Mayorkas stated earlier this week during a White House press briefing, “We did not examine that set of folks.” He went on to say that he didn’t know if any of them who had been freed were infected with Covid.
Migrants who are freed by border patrol officers are issued an order to appear in immigration court, but Mayorkas admits that the likelihood of most of them attending is minimal.
According to prior Department of Justice data, around 44 percent of the newly freed group are not anticipated to appear. On social media, Republicans were outraged by Mayorkas’ interview, with many seeing it as an admission of defeat in the immigration crisis and proof that he should resign.
Mayorkas was also questioned on the story that border patrol agents used whips against the Haitian migrants, after an image of an agent holding the reins of his horse while chasing someone near the border appeared to show him carrying a whip.
Mayorkas stated that the photos “painfully brought up the ugliest parts of our nation’s continuing struggle against systematic racism,” only for the photographer to explain that he “never saw them beat anyone.”
