Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas appeared at the Politico Security Summit on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, and told a Washington audience that the Biden administration should have moved sooner to tighten the southern border, conceding the central argument that Republicans had been making for years and that he had spent his entire tenure at DHS publicly and repeatedly rejecting.
Mayorkas said: “I was very pleased that in June of 2024, we took executive action that I thought made reforms that were sensible and that proved successful. If those executive actions had been taken one or two years earlier.”
He did not finish that sentence. He did not need to. The admission contained in its unfinished form was damning enough.
Mayorkas said he had “areas of disagreement” with Biden administration immigration policy. When asked about border policies under former President Joe Biden, which became a significant issue ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Mayorkas remarked that, despite some areas of disagreement, he was largely satisfied with his work under Biden.
He said: “I was very pleased that in June of 2024, we took executive action that I thought made reforms that were sensible and that proved successful.”
The June 2024 executive action that Mayorkas cited as his example of sensible reform was the Biden administration’s eleventh-hour decision to temporarily suspend and restrict the entry of most noncitizens crossing the southern border while tightening asylum eligibility requirements. The executive action, taken five months before the November 2024 presidential election, was widely characterized at the time as too little, too late after three and a half years of an open-border approach that had allowed more than seven million illegal crossings under Biden’s watch.
Mayorkas now says that if the same action had been taken one or two years earlier, things would have been different. One or two years earlier would have been June 2022 or June 2023. More than three million people entered illegally before Biden ever acted.
In an appearance at the Politico Security Summit, Mayorkas discussed aspects of the broken immigration system in America, acknowledging that a low bar for those expressing credible fear of persecution allowed too many migrants into the country during the Biden administration. More than eight million entered by the start of Biden’s final year in office, before Biden moved to shut down the border and crack down on illegal crossings via executive order.
The specific acknowledgment that the credible fear bar was too low is a significant concession. The credible fear standard governs whether asylum seekers can remain in the United States while their cases are adjudicated. Republican critics argued throughout the Biden years that the standard had been interpreted so broadly that it functioned as a catch-and-release mechanism that admitted virtually anyone who claimed it.
Mayorkas told Congress and the American public repeatedly that the system was operating as designed and the border was secure. He now says the bar was too low. Both things cannot be true simultaneously.
Mayorkas said: “Our tougher border stance in June of 24 was coupled with an increased focus on providing lawful pathways for people to arrive at the United States outside the hands of smugglers, more secure and more humanitarian. Those two combined, our numbers dropped 70 to 75 percent.”
He also remarked that if he had known that “irresponsible politics” would prevent congressional action, perhaps the administration would have taken executive action more rapidly.
The 70 to 75 percent reduction in crossings following the June 2024 executive action is the statistic that should have been generating the most attention throughout the Biden era. The administration possessed the executive authority to reduce illegal crossings by 70 to 75 percent. It waited until June 2024 to use it.
Mayorkas is now acknowledging that using it one or two years earlier would have produced better outcomes. The obvious question, asked by essentially every Republican who has commented on his Tuesday remarks, is why he did not use it one or two years earlier.
When asked whether he felt he had the support from the president to succeed, Mayorkas responded: “There were areas of disagreement within immigration policy and in other areas, but I voiced my views.”
The phrase “I voiced my views” is doing an enormous amount of work in a very small space. Mayorkas ran the Department of Homeland Security for four years. He was the Cabinet secretary responsible for border security.
He is now acknowledging that he had views about immigration policy that differed from the administration’s approach and that his response to those disagreements was to voice his views internally. He is implying that he advised Biden to act sooner on the border and that Biden declined to follow that advice.
If that is an accurate account of what happened, it raises questions about why Mayorkas spent four years telling Congress and the American public that the border was secure when he privately believed that the administration’s approach was producing outcomes inconsistent with the legal mandate he was sworn to uphold.
Republican critics noted that Mayorkas repeatedly testified under oath that the border was the most secure in history, and that his new statements about disagreeing with Biden administration policy amount to admitting he lied to Congress under oath.
The congressional record of Mayorkas’s sworn testimony provides the specific context against which his Tuesday remarks must be measured. The former DHS chief testified several times to Congress that illegal crossings were not an issue under Biden and the border was secure, leading to his impeachment in February 2024.
He told a House committee just weeks after the impeachment: “With the authorities and the funding that we have, it is as secure as it can be.”
He said this after more than seven million illegal crossings. He said this after a surge in fentanyl trafficking that was killing Americans by the tens of thousands annually. He said this after the deaths of migrants in horrific circumstances including suffocation in tractor-trailers.
He said the border was as secure as it could be.
The impeachment of Mayorkas by the Republican-led House in February 2024 was, at the time, dismissed by Democrats as a historically unprecedented political stunt without constitutional basis. The underlying charge was that Mayorkas had willfully refused to enforce existing immigration law and made false statements to Congress.
His Tuesday remarks, in which he acknowledged that the border enforcement approach was inadequate and that executive action should have been taken one or two years earlier than it was, constitute a post-hoc validation of precisely the conduct that the impeachment alleged.
When asked whether he believed Biden acting sooner on border reform could have prevented President Donald Trump from being elected, Mayorkas was less direct: “I am not in a position to speculate, but I will tell you that I would be far more better rested and less punched.”
The “better rested and less punched” response is the most revealing statement of the entire Politico appearance. Mayorkas is acknowledging, in the language of personal relief he would have felt, that the border policy approach produced political and personal consequences that he now believes could have been avoided with earlier executive action. He is not saying Biden’s border approach was right. He is saying it was costly.
Politico reported that Mayorkas acknowledged Tuesday that the US should have acted sooner to tighten immigration controls at the US border with Mexico, conceding ground on a critique that fueled Republican attacks on the department he ran for four years.
That concession, made 16 months after leaving office, is the kind of admission that Republican members of Congress who spent years confronting Mayorkas in hearings where he insisted the border was secure will be citing for the remainder of this political era.
The man who ran the department now says the approach was wrong. The Republicans who said it was wrong at the time were right.
The timing of Mayorkas’s public re-emergence is notable. He has barely spoken publicly since leaving DHS in January 2025. Mayorkas has not been exactly visible in his post-DHS life. There appears to be no public record of his current employment, which is unusual for a former Cabinet member.
His decision to appear at the Politico Security Summit to discuss immigration policy 16 months after leaving office, at a moment when the Trump administration is reporting ICE arrests at 4.4 times the Biden baseline and interior deportations at five times the Biden level, reflects a political calculation whose purpose is not immediately obvious.
The charitable interpretation is that Mayorkas genuinely believes the historical record should reflect the internal disagreements within the Biden administration about immigration policy, and that he is correcting a narrative that has characterized the Biden approach as uniformly cohesive when in fact he privately advocated for a different direction.
The less charitable interpretation is that he is attempting to rehabilitate his own reputation by retroactively positioning himself as the voice of reason within an administration whose immigration failures he is no longer required to defend publicly.
Texas Republican Representative Brandon Gill wrote: “Joe Biden ordering our military and CBP agents to lift up the barbed wire fencing that my state of Texas put up to defend all of us from the Democrat sanctioned third world invasion, will forever go down as one of the most treasonous acts committed against our country by a sitting president.”
While Gill’s language is characteristically strong, the underlying facts he references are documented: the Biden administration’s DHS directed Border Patrol agents to remove Texas’s concertina wire barriers at the border, and the administration went to court to prevent Texas from installing additional barriers on its own soil.
Those actions, taken while Mayorkas was insisting the border was secure, are difficult to reconcile with his Tuesday claim to have privately advocated for tighter enforcement.
The contradiction at the heart of Mayorkas’s Tuesday remarks is not subtle. He ran a department that removed state-installed barriers, released millions of illegal immigrants into the interior, maintained a credible fear bar he now says was too low, and told Congress under oath that the border was as secure as it could be.
He is now saying the approach should have been different one to two years earlier. He cannot have been simultaneously implementing the right policy while believing the right policy was something materially different from what he was implementing.
More than 7 million people entered the United States illegally under the Biden administration’s watch while Mayorkas was running DHS. Those 7 million people did not cross because of circumstances beyond the administration’s control. They crossed because of deliberate policy choices about how vigorously to enforce immigration law, what threshold to apply for credible fear claims, whether to maintain or remove border infrastructure, and how to use the executive authority that, by Mayorkas’s own Tuesday admission, was always available to reduce crossings by 70 to 75 percent and simply was not used until five months before the 2024 election.
The Trump administration has used that same executive authority to produce the most significant interior immigration enforcement operation in modern American history, with 340,000 arrests in the first year, an elevenfold increase in street arrests, and a fivefold increase in interior deportations. New legislation was not needed. A new president was.
Tom Homan, the White House Border Czar, has made that point repeatedly in public appearances this week. New legislation was not needed to secure the border. What was needed was an administration that was willing to enforce the laws Congress had already passed.
Mayorkas’s admission that executive action could have been taken earlier is the implicit acknowledgment of that same reality: the tools existed. The political will to use them did not.
Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress the border was secure. He told the American people the border was secure. He is now telling Politico that the approach should have been different earlier.
These three statements form a contradiction that no amount of diplomatic framing about voicing views and areas of disagreement can resolve. The American people experienced the consequences of the approach he was responsible for implementing.
