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Mayorkas fears the threats ahead: 'I don't think the American public understands the breadth'

Michael Wilner, McClatchy Washington Bureau on

Published in News & Features

WASHINGTON — With just four days left of the Biden administration, art still hangs in Alejandro Mayorkas’ office in the far reaches of southeast Washington, where a tall window alcove overlooks a snowy capital. Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security are beginning to turn in their badges. An emotional farewell for the secretary, held at headquarters earlier in the week, brought many on his staff to tears.

Across the department’s sprawling campus, at the former site of St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital, political staff are taking stock of what they accomplished. Some are plotting escapes to warmer climates in an effort to distract themselves from the coming change. Career officials are bracing for a policy whirlwind.

Mayorkas is reflecting, as well, on what he described in one of his final interviews as an incalculable onslaught of homeland security threats that relentlessly challenged the outgoing administration and will be inherited by the next.

“I don’t think the American public understands the breadth and diversity of the challenges this department confronts and overcomes,” Mayorkas said.

The incoming administration of President Donald Trump will face three primary “threat vectors,” Mayorkas said, including the threats of foreign terrorism that first gave rise to the department after Sept. 11, 2001.

But threats from domestic violent extremists — those already present in the country, radicalized by ideologies of terrorism, hate, false narratives, anti-government sentiment or simple personal grievances — have only increased. And so have threats from foreign powers, which appear increasingly emboldened to launch direct, if unconventional attacks on the homeland.

“Those three vectors are coexisting, and that leads to a heightened threat environment. The threat of domestic violent extremism has not abated — in fact, I would posit that it has grown,” he added. “We all will see how the incoming administration handles these threats, and hopefully they can take measures that diminish them.”

Mayorkas has had multiple conversations with Trump’s choice for his successor, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, preparing her to face enemies of the United States that will not give the new government time to learn on the job. (But the extent of her power and influence in the new Trump administration is an open question. One of Trump’s closest aides, Stephen Miller, has been named the president-elect’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, and is expected to dominate policymaking for DHS from the White House.)

Last year, hacking groups associated with the Chinese government — dubbed Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon — succeeded in unprecedented breaches of U.S. critical infrastructure and telecommunications systems. The Russian government recently plotted to plant explosives on Western cargo planes, said Mayorkas, who declined to detail how far Moscow had advanced in its planning.

And Iran’s “persistent intent” for revenge against the first Trump administration, which ordered the assassination of its top general, Qasem Soleimani, in 2020, remains active. “I can’t speak to the specifics of the threat, but they remain intent on avenging the death of Soleimani,” he said, asked whether Tehran is still trying to assassinate Trump himself — a threat that loomed throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.

“I can go on and on across the spectrum of our work and identify a whole series of challenges,” Mayorkas added.

Yet it is immigration — not the complex constellation of threats facing the country and resting on his shoulders — that drove public perception of Mayorkas’ tenure and will forge his legacy.

No single issue handed Trump a decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. But among a handful of top issues that decided the race, immigration was undeniably one of them. Exit polls found those who considered immigration their top issue entering the voting booth chose Trump over Harris nine times out of 10. Democrats on Capitol Hill are already shifting course, embracing legislation to detain undocumented migrants for minor crimes in a move unthinkable to the party just a few years ago.

On a call with reporters Tuesday detailing the administration’s final tranche of border security statistics, Mayorkas was triumphant. “In December, we again saw fewer border encounters than the monthly average for 2019,” he said. “In fact, the number of encounters we experienced in December — 47,300 — is the lowest monthly number since July 2020, a year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

But bookending statistics fail to acknowledge the stark reality that an historic number of unauthorized border crossings consistently saddled the Biden administration, peaking at 249,741 encounters in December 2023, the most ever recorded in a single month.

Could the administration have done more? Did Biden’s decision — or inability — to do so fuel Trump’s return to power?

 

“Your question actually goes to a political issue of a loss of power, and that is beyond my remit,” Mayorkas said. President Joe Biden signed executive action last summer severely restricting the ability of individuals crossing the border illegally to request asylum, a move that critics said came too late to make a political impact.

Whether more could have been done, sooner, “is a question I would probably leave to others,” he added. “In a large organization, which this administration is — and I have served in other administrations as well — there are differing points of view. Those differing points of view are voiced, are discussed and debated, and decisions are made, and then everyone marches together consistent with the decision that was made.”

What Mayorkas is sure of is that the incoming administration, despite its rhetoric, will face the same gauntlet of challenges that burdened his team.

Incoming Trump administration officials, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, have said that deporting up to a million people a year is a realistic goal. Mayorkas does not disagree.

“We have returned and removed over 700,000, 750,000 this year” from CBP facilities, Mayorkas said. “So yes. We have done that, and it’s actually the highest level of returns and removals, I think, in a decade.”

“If they’re talking about from the interior, that’s a different question,” he added, referring to immigrants living in the United States. “If they’re speaking of removing a million people from the interior of the United States, that would rely upon their ability to have resources that we have not had — personnel resources, facilities, transportation, et cetera — a whole infrastructure that we have not had.”

Trump campaigned on a plan to deploy the U.S. military as a supplemental force to help round up, detain and deport migrants across the country, an unprecedented use of the armed forces in modern times.

Defense Department assets “would be additional resources,” Mayorkas said, while adding, “there will be legal challenges.”

Even today, Biden’s strongest executive action on the border is facing scrutiny in court — a legal fight the administration had anticipated, and that deterred the outgoing president’s aides from taking action sooner.

Mayorkas and his team also note that the beginning of the administration was a different time that presented an entirely distinct set of decision-making. Throughout the pandemic, a bipartisan consensus had formed to keep Title 42, an authority that allowed for expulsions at the border during public health emergencies, in place. And the prospect of bipartisan immigration reform appeared real and tangible for a flicker of a moment last year, before Trump directed Republicans to kill it, Mayorkas said.

Going forward, the incoming administration will have a stark choice, whether to maintain carefully negotiated agreements with foreign nations to accept deportees or to start from scratch. In a world under so many pressures, migrants arriving at U.S. borders often come from countries with precarious or severed diplomatic ties to Washington, making it impossible to deport their nationals on flights back home.

Without those agreements in place, pressure will fall on the administration to construct a detention system within the homeland at a scale previously unseen in U.S. history.

Either choice will not change the fundamental migration crisis facing the Western Hemisphere and the wider world, Mayorkas said. The International Organization for Migration reported a record number of displaced people around the world in 2024.

“We’re speaking of a displacement that is global in scale,” he added. “They said they’re going to prioritize national security and public safety threats. That’s exactly what we’ve done.”

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©2025 McClatchy Washington Bureau. Visit mcclatchydc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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