'Chaos and Confusion': NBC Host Tears Biden Border Chief To Shreds On-Air Over Border Crisis
Members of Joe Biden’s regime are generally used to being treated to softball interviews with the establishment media, but NBC’s Savannah Guthrie was uncharacteristically prepared to hold Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ feet to the fire over the border crisis last week.
Mayorkas indulged a tour of the networks and other liberal media outlets on Friday to try and allay fears over the ending of Donald Trump’s Title 42 rules that had been putting limits on the number of illegal immigrants allowed to freely cross the southern border.
Most of his appearances were friendly interviews, but then he ended up on NBC’s “Today” and faced some unusually pointed questions about the mounting border crisis from Guthrie.
Indeed, Guthrie hit Mayorkas with a serious question right out of the gate.
“Let us not sugar coat us. Already, you have a record number of crossings, exceeding your own internal estimates,” Guthrie sternly noted at the outset. “You have severely overcrowded detention facilities already. The president himself acknowledged this week it’s going to be chaotic for a while. That’s his word not my word.
“My question to you is why? You have had two years to prepare for this. Why? Why do we have this chaos and confusion at the border,” she asked Mayorkas.
In reply, Mayorkas tried to spin for all he was worth.
“Savannah, the answer is very, very clear,” he said, though his follow up to that didn’t seem at all clear.
“We are operating within the constraints of a broken immigration system. There is unanimous agreement about that fact. Our system has been broken for more than two decades. It was last reformed in the 1990s,” he said, adding that DHS has been denied the “resources that we need” and “have requested” by Congress.
But Guthrie was undaunted by all that filibustering. She realized that Mayorkas didn’t come anywhere near answering her question of why the Biden regime has made no move to prepare for this moment even after two years of foreknowledge that this policy was going to end.
As Title 42 expires, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas joins @SavannahGuthrie to discuss the chaos and severe overcrowding at the southern border saying, “We are operating within the constraints of a broken immigration system.” pic.twitter.com/24xeYRoKrU
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) May 12, 2023
Guthrie soon cut him off and asked, “I was going to say fair enough, but given those undisputed facts that we do have a broken immigration system, why not delay the expiration of Title 42 until you are ready to handle it?”
The NBC anchor then added: “Even some Democratic congress members such as Vincente Gonzalez from Texas has suggested, let’s delay it for a little while and, and get more ready.”
But Mayorkas disingenuously replied that “we have been preparing for this moment for more than a year and a half” with a plan that the plan will need more time to “show results.”
Guthrie was not satisfied. She pointed out that the regional processing centers DHS keeps talking about haven’t even been constructed yet and asked how he can claim that they have been preparing for this for two years.
Mayorkas lapsed into more spinning with wild claims that Biden “has led the greatest expansion of lawful pathways ever” and said the U.S. has “communicated to the migrants, to individuals who are thinking of taking the journey that there is a right way to do it that is lawful, safe, and orderly, and there is a wrong way and the wrong way is in the hands of smugglers.”
Mayorkas also made the claim that “we are going to be delivering tougher consequences” to illegal immigrants, despite the few consequences they have actually faced outside the Title 42 restrictions.
Guthrie pointed out immediately that the Biden regime had decided to allow illegals “to be released into this country, but with no court date and no way to track them” and went on to say “people at home” know full well that millions of illegals are crossing the border without suffering any real consequences at all. She then told Mayorkas that “there is a subset of people who are being released into this country with no court date and no way to track them. I mean, that sounds like the border is open for some.”
Mayorkas then insisted that “the vast majority are being removed.”
Guthrie also slammed Mayorkas from the left by reminding her audience that Joe Biden called Donald Trump un-American for his first country asylum policy where migrants are required to be denied asylum in the first free country they entered before getting here and before being allowed to file for asylum in the U.S.A. She even played video of then candidate Joe Biden attacking Trump for the policy before she noted to Mayorkas that Biden is now continuing the same Trump policy he originally called un-American.
Guthrie’s final question was more pointed than the rest.
“Does the President bear some responsibility for the surge we’re seeing right now?” she asked, before playing another clip of Biden spouting off about immigration in 2019.
In the clip, Biden is heard saying, “All those people are seeking asylum, we’re a nation that says if you want to flee and you’re facing oppression, you should come.”
Guthrie noted that Biden’s words made millions assume that he was throwing the border wide open for everyone.
“Mr. Secretary, they came. They’re sitting outside our border right now. It is cold at night. It is sizzling hot during the day. It is dust. There are children. They came. Did that messaging encourage people to make this crossing?” Guthrie asked.
In a final disingenuous reply, Mayorkas blamed the drug cartel criminals and Congress.
Guthrie’s hard questions revealed Mayorkas to be engaging in naked political spin, instead of offering serious border crisis resolutions. No wonder there is more and more talk of impeaching him from his position.
Americans — even Democrats — fully understand that we are suffering a massive crisis at the U.S. border and both Alejandro Mayorkas and President Joe Biden are making it all far, far worse.
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