Mayorkas Meetings: Coddling ‘Abolish ICE’ Activists and Botching ‘Reunification’

Documents exemplify reason for lack of trust in DHS 

Historians documenting the situation at the U.S. border for the last four years would do well to look at the internal communications of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The seeds of a disaster in the making are apparent.

According to DHS documents obtained via FOIA request by government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, Biden-Harris DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met with someone outside the department on July 23, 2021. A briefing for the secretary about the meeting said, “The purpose of this engagement is to highlight that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not have the necessary government authorities or resources for all that needs to be accomplished to reunify families within the scope of the Family Reunification Task Force.” 

And yet DHS soldiered on and in 2024 reported that it had lost track of 320,000 illegal immigrant children.

Mayorkas did have one important resource: Time to meet with activists suing the department over immigration matters. CASA is a Maryland-based group that has expressed a pro-illegal immigration stance. Along with a smorgasbord of issue advocacy, including a costly antisemitic stance on Hamas and Israel, it openly seeks to abolish ICE. 

On June 25, 2021, CASA requested a meeting between its leadership and “Secretary Mayorkas and his team.” The meeting would cover the “big picture about immigration reform,” DHS’s plans for the year, “pressing issues impacting immigrants regionally,” and strategies “to celebrate policy wins including a series of events.”  

Mayorkas’s office ran the meeting by a DHS ethics official who signed off on it, despite noting that “CASA is party to a lot of law suits against DHS, including matters involving asylum, DACA, even USCIS fees, and a case currently in DC District Court related to the regulations preventing asylum seekers from working while their cases are pending.” CASA also has a PAC called CASA in Action that was, in its own words, “actively involved in the 2021 Virginia primaries.”

“The secretary of DHS was informed that one of the pillars of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration strategy was doomed to fail yet they plowed ahead with it anyway, at the cost of over 300,000 children they released into who knows where with who knows whom,” said PPT president Michael Chamberlain. “Unfortunately, that sort of malfeasance is to be expected when they look to highly politicized organizations with a slew of business before the department to help them draft policy. And people wonder why trust in government suffered such a rapid descent during the last few years.”

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