Mayorkas Tries to Rewrite History on Biden’s Border Disaster

Jarrett Stepman

•   May 15, 2026

The man who oversaw the most catastrophic border crisis in American history now wants to rewrite the past and make the public believe he was just following orders.

In an interview with Politico on Tuesday, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas finally acknowledged that perhaps things got a tad out of control at the border on his watch.

He suggested that the administration should have ramped up border security just a tiny bit sooner.

If you recall, this is the same man who time and again insisted that the border was entirely “secure” despite witnessing the most porous, chaotic border in American history. He even did so during his testimony in Congress when he insisted that the unheard-of level of border crossings was really no issue at all.

When Politico asked Mayorkas if he could have done something sooner, he made it seem like he may have been for tighter border security than President Joe Biden.

“There were areas of disagreement within immigration policy … but I voiced my views,” he said in the most weaselly way possible. Then he said that his administration made “sensible” reforms in 2024 that “proved successful.”

Mayorkas was justifiably roasted by congressional Republicans on X for his sudden pivot.

Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., called Mayorkas a “contemptible liar.”

GOP Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., wrote that the reversal was “too late.”

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, N.J., accused Mayorkas of lying to Congress.

This criticism is all well deserved. But even with the backtracking, Mayorkas hasn’t exactly come clean. The border trouble wasn’t just a slow-moving thing that took years to get a handle on. Far from it.

From the moment Biden entered office, there was an explosion of people pouring into this country by the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions.

This became almost the defining feature of his administration—other than the fact that the president appeared to be no more than a senile old nothing-in-chief led on by his radical staffers and controlled by a narcissistic former president who couldn’t let go of power.

The border surge didn’t just devastate border towns, it hit nearly every city in America and completely overwhelmed local governments.

And while this apocalypse was happening, Mayorkas insisted time and again that all was well, that there was nothing to worry about, everything was under control.

Mayorkas even laughably said in an NPR interview in 2025 that the border was “more secure than it was at the end of 2019, the last year before the pandemic struck.”

Cue the laugh track. I don’t even think even the most dedicated NPR fan or Mayorkas himself bought that line.

Make no mistake, the Biden border crisis wasn’t caused by the pandemic; it wasn’t part of a “seasonal bump” as the media tried to frame it in its early stages. No, it was caused directly by the Biden administration when they reversed the effective policies of the first Trump administration and signaled that the days of effective border enforcement were over.

And Mayorkas absolutely let it happen in his role as essentially the border’s national rogue prosecutor.

Here he is bragging in 2021 about how the administration removed so many of the first Trump-era policies that it would “take so much time to list them.”

If you were even just marginally more aware than Biden was during his time in office, then you remember what happened next. Border crossings immediately exploded to a never-before-seen level.

At no point did it really slow down during Biden’s tenure until the final months when electoral defeat seemed likely. Then the whole border problem came abruptly to a halt when President Donald Trump took office, a telling sign that it was executive action (or, in Mayorkas’ case, inaction) that was the root issue at stake.

The question is, why is Mayorkas suddenly shifting his tune after gaslighting the American people for four years?

I suspect this is part of the Democratic Party’s attempt to change the narrative around immigration and make it seem like the Biden border calamity was an aberration rather than a built-in feature of how they rule.

There’s no doubt that the Biden-Mayorkas policies not only turned the American people against the administration but also made Americans far more restrictionist than they were before. Democrat politicians know that’s a huge problem, since their activist class and network of NGOs will never let the open border dream die.

So, they would rather keep the focus on resisting and demonizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement rather than being straight about what they will do if they take back national power.

They are counting on voters forgetting what happened and cleverly recalibrating their message to make it seem like the whole border crisis thing was simply Biden’s fault rather than a party-wide directive.

They’ll go with saying that all they want to do is put a damper on those meanies in ICE and pass some “commonsense” legislation to put an unfortunate few who broke our laws under Biden on a long-term path to citizenship.

What you’ll get is a bait-and-switch. We’ll get amnesty for millions and be right back to open borders mayhem that may be even more difficult to fix next time. 

That’s what they’re counting on.

Jarrett Stepman
Jarrett Stepman | Columnist
Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett

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