October 17, 2015 Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro
Mayorkas speaks onstage during Festival PEOPLE En Espanol 2015
presented by Verizon at Jacob Javitz Center in New York City.
Brad Barket / AFP
US President-elect Joe Biden signalled a sharp reversal
Monday from Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies with the choice
of Cuba-born Alejandro Mayorkas to lead the Department of Homeland
Security.
The former federal prosecutor ran US immigration services and
then was DHS deputy secretary in the Obama-Biden
administration.
READ ALSO: Biden To Appoint Longtime Aide Blinken As US
Top Diplomat
Most notably Mayorkas, who turns 61 on Tuesday, oversaw the
implementation of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
program, meant to offer a way to citizenship for millions of
longtime US residents who entered the country illegally.
Under Trump, that effort was halted and challenged in courts, as
part of the White House’s determined effort against undocumented
immigrants.
Mayorkas will be the first immigrant himself to lead the
sprawling DHS bureaucracy, whose mission is focused firstly on
protecting the country from terror and cyber-attacks and natural
disasters.
READ ALSO: Biden To Announce First Cabinet Appointments
On Tuesday
In a tweet, Mayorkas pointed to his own history as a refugee as
shaping his view of the job.
His mother was a Romanian Jew who fled to Cuba, and his father a
Cuban Jew who brought the family to the United States in 1960
before Mayorkas’ first birthday.
“When I was very young, the United States provided my family and
me a place of refuge,” he wrote.
“Now, I have been nominated to be the DHS secretary and oversee
the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in
search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.”
– Trump politicized DHS –
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But Mayorkas, who goes by the nickname Ali, will have a much larger
challenge.
DHS was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda
attacks to coordinate domestic security against potential
terrorism.
But it also assumed controls of borders and immigration
enforcement, disaster management, cybersecurity, and air and sea
transportation security.
Now, with some 240,000 employees, it is a sprawling department
whose core mission is poorly defined, and which was deeply
politicized by Trump.
Trump churned the DHS leadership as he sought officials who
would pursue an absolute halt to legal and illegal immigration and
be willing to resort to extreme measures, like separating families
and isolating children, to deter undocumented immigrants.
He also had DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency,
known as ICE, step up raids on illegal immigrants, deporting
thousands as Trump sweepingly branded all of them “gang members,”
“drug smugglers” and “rapists and murderers.”
That has led to calls to eliminate ICE.
Meanwhile, Trump took aim at DHS officials who dared to
undermine his political agenda, including those who said the
leading US domestic threat was from extreme-right white nationalist
and neo-Nazi ideologues, and not from the left as Trump
claimed.
And last week Trump summarily fired the DHS head of election
security, Chris Krebs, who had rejected his assertions of “massive
fraud” in the November 3 vote.
Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro, who leads the
Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called Mayorkas “a fantastic
choice.”
“After the cruelty and devastation wrought by the Trump
administration, Mayorkas has a mandate to overhaul DHS,” Castro
said.
“As the former Deputy Secretary of DHS and lead implementor of
DACA, he has the necessary experience to bring about much-needed
reforms.”
AFP
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