“Short-term solutions” are needed, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday.
The Department of Homeland Security is assigning hundreds of asylum officers to the border to sort through the region’s recent surge in humanitarian needs, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday.
“Short-term solutions” are needed to address the “decades-old problem” of a “broken immigrationsystem,” Mayorkas said in explaining the surge.
“We are clear-eyed about the challenges we are likely to face in the days and weeks ahead. … We are taking this approach within the constraints of a broken immigration system that Congress has not fixed for more than two decades and without the resources we need: personnel, facilities, transportation and others that we have requested of Congress and that we were not given,” he said.
The rising number of migrants crossing the border “places an incredible strain on our personnel, our facilities and our communities with whom we partner closely,” he added.