The balancing act
IT WAS AROUND 4 A.M. ON APRIL 28 WHEN HOMELAND Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas jolted himself awake. As he lay in the dark, his mind locked onto the decision he had made the day before to limit the Trump-era practice of arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants who show up at local courthouses for legal proceedings.
Unable to sleep, he got out of bed, fired off an email about the politically sensitive move and then turned to the next conundrum. In the dark, he scanned the most recent data on how long unaccompanied minors were spending in Border Patrol custody, one of several onerous issues awaiting him in the day ahead. “There are times when I try to go back to bed, and there are times when I realize it’s not going to work,” Mayorkas says 3½ hours later over the engine noise of a Coast Guard Gulfstream jet, heading from Washington, D.C., to New York City’s La Guardia airport for a day of meetings. “This morning it wasn’t going to work.”
A veteran federal prosecutor and top immigration official, Mayorkas has handled ethically fraught law-enforcement issues for most of his adult life. But this is a new kind of pressure. He inherited the mess left by the Trump Administration’s anti-immigrant crusade: an estimated 1,000 children still separated from their families, 395,000 refugees waiting for word on their asylum requests, and a massive backlog of 1 million citizenship applications unprocessed. At the same time, he faces a surge of
