- ‘I did not expect to be in late September where we are’ Mayorkas said
- Trump, on Monday, claimed that the migrants had been released ‘with no vetting, checking or even minimal understanding of who they are’
- Images show Haitian migrants playing games on a beach in Columbia as tourists walk by, seemingly not phased as they continue enjoying their vacation
- Some Haitians were seen playing games, including dominoes, with fellow Venezuelan travelers who are also hoping to seek asylum in the U.S.
- The photos from the beach paint a strikingly different narrative than images showing caravans of migrants attempting to cross through jungles, rivers and other dangerous conditions
- The newly released images come as the American government has admitted that 12,000 Haitian migrants have been released into the U.S.
- Mayorkas claims that number could go up as 5,000 other cases are still being processed
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday he did not expect such a surge in the Delta Covid-19 variant as he admitted that the ‘rate of illness’ at the southern border is now 20%.
‘What I didn’t expect was the tragic rise of the delta variant,’ the secretary said at the virtual Immigration Law and Policy Conference Monday afternoon. ‘And we took a step back by reason of that. I did not expect to be in late September where we are.’
He said that one in five migrants are showing up at the border with an ‘illness.’
‘We are confronted with a population of people that, as a general matter, that have a rate of illness of approximately 20%.’
‘When one is speaking of 7,000 or 7,500 people encountered at the border every day, if one takes a look at that the system, it is not built for that in a Covid environment where isolation is required,’ Mayorkas said.
He said that many were willing to endure the ‘level of violence’ it took to embark on the dangerous journey across Latin America to the US border because of economic desperation brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, and compounded by a major earthquake in Haiti last month, and political instability that left Haiti’s prime minister assassinated in July.
It is not clear how the secretary came to the 20% figure, as he has long said DHS does not have the capacity to test every individual arriving at the southern border and relies on local governments and communities for help.
On Friday, Mayorkas had told reporters that he did not know how many of the nearly 17,000 once camped out under the International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas had contracted Covid-19 as DHS was not testing the migrants.
‘We did not test that population of individuals,’ Mayorkas said. ‘We do not know, I do not know, I should say if I may be perfectly accurate, I do not know if anyone was sick with COVID. We certainly had some people get sick, not with COVID to my knowledge and we addressed their illnesses.’
Former President Trump, meanwhile, claimed that the migrants had been released ‘with no vetting, checking or even minimal understanding of who they are.’
‘Some are very sick with extremely contagious diseases, even worse than the China Virus. They are not masked or mandated, but just let free to roam all over our Country and affect what was just a year ago, a great Nation.’