Alejandro Mayorkas

Alohundro Mayorchis is the Secretary of Homeland Security, a department created after nine to eleven. Alohundro Mayorchis overseas through his department, border security a top issue for certain in the next presidential election. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Alohandro Mayorchis, an immigrant from Cuba, to talk about

To the best of my knowledge, it's over, so you know, quite frankly, I have said publicly a number of times that I did not allow it to distract me. That was actually sincere I focused intensely on my work throughout. In a week where it was an issue of greater prominence in the life of the department, I might have spent twenty minutes on it. I really just focused on my work. It had its impact on loved ones.

So it's behind us now.

Though, as Will Rogers once said, and paraphrasing him, the country is never safe as long as the house is in session, right, so you never know, but may never come back, right, one would hope not.

Okay, so let's talk about the border.

It appears that there are a lot of people coming in over the border. This is obviously one of the subjects of that people wanted to impeach you. Some people wanted to them peach you over Is it really that we're getting more people coming in over the border illegally or is it just the appearance of that?

Oh no, No, The number of encounters at the southern border is very high, but it's very very important number one to contextualize it and number two to explain it from a context perspective. The world is seeing the greatest level of displacement since at least World War Two. I think the recent report was that there are seventy three million displaced people in the United States. And so the challenge of migration is not exclusive to the southern border, nor to the western hemisphere.

It is global.

And when I speak to partners across the Atlantic, it's the first issue that they raise.

The first challenge that what is the reason for that? So well, one has.

The customary reasons of displacement, violence insecurity, poverty, corruption, authoritarian regimes, now increasingly extreme weather events that propel people to leave. Why are we experiencing what we are? It is for those very reasons why people leave their countries of origin. We also remember, in our hemisphere we overcame COVID more rapidly than any other country. We had, in a post COVID world, eleven million jobs to fill. We are a

So in our country, if somebody seeks political asylum and they legitimately need political asylum, is it our law that they automatically get it if they have legitimate means. There's no quotas or anything on how many people we can accept for a political asylum.

There is no quota on the asylum population, and one just has to persuade a judge.

So you've been Homeland Security secretary under President Biden from the beginning of administration. So how many people would you say since that time have come over the border of the southern border, let's say, illegally seeking asylum. They're bringing drugs or whatever they're doing.

I do want to differentiate because we're in a political environment that demonizes individuals encounter at the border, and there's a vulnerability to painting with a broad brush people who are fleeing in coming to the United States. And so I want to separate and I will be incessant in this separate drug smugglers from individuals seeking asylum or even if they don't have a basis to remain in the United States seeking.

A better life.

And so the number of encounters have been very well published this past year. This past month, we had about one hundred and thirty four thousand encounters in.

This past month. But let's say since the beginning of the administration. Is it millions of people? It's several million people. Well, there was legislation that was developed, I think in the Senate, bipartisan legislation, and it got stalled. AT's say in the House? Would that have solved our problem?

Had it passed, it would have been a transformative change in managing the number of people we encounter.

What was the main thing that would have been in that law that we don't have now.

That you would have liked to have.

So we would have taken a seven plus year time period between the time of encounter and final adjudication and reduced it to as little as ninety days. And that changes an intending migrants risk calculus, because if they know that they can stay for multiple years and work and make more money than they can and safely so than in their country of origin, they will decide to make

But that industry is it one design to bring drugs into the United States or designed to get people to come United States for which they get a fee.

It is the latter.

But what we are seeing, and it should be unsurprising to everyone that we're seeing a not quite a merger, I would say, a synthesis of transnational criminal organizations and the smuggling organizations.

There's so much money to be made.

The people who.

Are now coming over. Are we separating families like words? Under the Trump administration, there was a lot of controversy children being separated from parents.

Is that happening now or not happening?

No, that was a deliberate practice to deter families from reaching the southern border. Was the separation of them That was condemned across the board. Cruelty is not something that is an instrument of a value based country, and we

Okay, so President Trump campaigned when he first campaigned for president, on creating a wall, and I guess some part of the wall was built. But would not a wall have helped somewhat if we had a big wall? Would that not block people from coming? Even though people like to make fun of the wall and expensive, would it not have had some impact on reducing illegal immigration?

So look, in the twenty first century, I wouldn't necessarily propose cementing ballards on the ground and constructing an immovable wall, given the dynamism and you know, the rapid change in migratory patterns. But I just have to quote Secretary of Politano, you build a twenty foot wall, they'll build a twenty one foot ladder.

Let's talk about your background.

You don't come to the cabinet with the conventional background of many people who had this position.

So where were you born?

I was born in Havana, Cuba.

Really, and what age did you leave?

My parents brought my sister and me here to the United States as political refugees when I was about one.

And did they come in I legally or illegally?

They came in illegally.

My father was a bit prescient. Although we didn't leave early, but we left early enough.

So there isn't that big a Cuban or wasn't that big a Cuban Jewish community. But your mother and father both Jewish. Her father was Sephardic, yes, and his ancestors came from His.

Father was from Turkey, his mother from Poland.

And your mother was Ashkenazi Jewish.

My mother fled Romania to France, France to Cuba late. Her father lost eight brothers and other family in the concentration camps. They left so late they couldn't get to Israel, and our policies at that time were not as welcoming as one would have hoped at a time of great human distress.

Okay, so they came to the United States legally. Where did they come?

So we arrived in Miami, and we lived in Miami until my father found a better work opportunity in Los Angeles, California.

You were growing up in Los Angeles.

I grew up for most of my life in Los Angeles.

And you speak Spanish fluently, I speak at my grammar is not something that I take great pride in.

Okay, So where did you go to high school?

I went to Beverly Hills High School.

Beverly Hills High School with a lot of movie stars kids and things like that.

You know, it's interesting that you would you consider Jack Abramoff a movie star. I don't remember any movie stars. You know, when you hear probably when everyone hears Beverly Hills High School, they think you know the Clampet family. There were four elementary schools that fed into the high school.

Two were tended to be.

Of a more affluent community and the other two were quite frankly modest. I grew up in a lower middle class the middle class home, never wanting for anything, an incredibly close family.

You have siblings.

I have three siblings, And are they interested in homeland security or not so much?

They are probably recent devotees.

Okay, So where did you go to Where did you go to college?

I went to University of California at Berkeley.

Okay, so you graduate me or then you went to law school in Los Angeles?

Loyal law school?

All right? So you graduated from law school, and what did you do?

I went into a law firm. I wanted to go into public service. This country has given my family everything, and I very much wanted to give back. I wanted to go into public service, and I had my eyes on the United States Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. They required three years of experience, and so I gained three years of experience in a private law firm.

And then went into the US Attorney's office.

So you went into as a federal prosecutor, and you were an assistant US attorney in Los Angeles.

For eight and a half years, specializing in sophisticated fraud cases.

Did you get involved in the campaign when Barack Obama was running for president?

Were you involved in his campaign anyway? I was okay.

So you ultimately get involved in the transition with Barack Obama.

Yeah.

I led the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice transition to.

And you took a position in the Obama administration. Initially, what was your position?

The position was the Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Department that administers the Legal Legal Immigration Center.

And then after that you got promoted to be the Deputy Homeland Security Secretary under Janet Napolitano. Yes, okay, And so that didn't convince you that this is a complicated area and you shouldn't want to come back as secretary, or.

That I am complicated, difficult, challenging and extraordinarily full.

Right, So you go back after the President Obama Leave's office, you go back, you join held Wilma hal And in Whatsch City here in Washington. Okay, so you're a partner there. How did you get connected to the Biden administration? Did they remember you from the Obama administration or they did They just called you up and said, guess what we like us, deputy, Now you can be the secretary.

I wouldn't say it was in that way, but I was.

Extraordinarily proud to be contacted by the incoming president, the president elect, to be considered.

Then, did your family say you're making a lot of money here, your way up here in compensation and you're going to go down here again and that was a factor.

No, you didn't care, Okay, didn't care. It wouldn't be. It is what it is, what it is. Okay.

So let's talk about the Department of Homeland Security. How many people work at the Department of Homeland Security.

About two hundred and sixty thousand. When are they third largest department in the federal government.

What are the main parts of it?

I know you have certain parts that were put together out of Treasury Department other things.

What are your main divisions?

The expanse of our portfolio is extraordinary, from online child sexual exploitation and abuse, crimes of exploitation, human trafficking, to facilitating lawful trade and travel, to search and rescue and security in the Arctic and the Indo Pacific, to addressing the flooding yesterday and today in Houston, Texas, where we have a number of fatalities, and the frequency and gravity of extreme weather events is only growing, the cyber attacks

Do you ever get a weekend off you don't have to worry about some crisis somewhere?

I take My goal is to take half a Saturday.

So a number of people I think from Homeland Security and or the CIA or NSA have gone to Capitol Hill and said that TikTok is a danger to our NAB security, but the public hasn't been given that much detailed information about what the threat is. How much of a threat to our nation security is TikTok?

The People's Republic of China.

Acts adversely to the interests of the United States in different ways. One of those ways is through the dissemination of disinformation, the intentional communication of false statements, and TikTok is an extraordinary avenue through which to disseminate disinformation to millions and millions of people.

But newspapers can disseminate this information. Why is it If it's over social media, it's got to be banned. If a newspaper says the kind of same things that is over TikTok, it wouldn't be banned because of the First Amendment. Why is the First Amendment not protecting the TikTok social media devices?

Well, it's not to me an issue of the First Amendment. It's an issue of security. As we are talking about a company and an algorithm that is controlled by a foreign state that acts adversely to the interests of the United States, and we have an obligation.

To protect Americans.

But the presumption is that people aren't smart enough to know that it's disinformation, and they can't make the decision for themselves.

Is that right?

Well, we're talking about many, many young people that access TikTok. I would posit that in this country we don't have the level of digital literacy that I think we would all want. We're all vulnerable to disinformation, and the reality is that we have an obligation to safeguard against it. We're talking about the intentional dissemination of false information.

Okay, I should disclose that my firm is an investor in bteedance. I'm not personally an investor, but my firm did invest in it. So let me go on to another subject. Then, okay, so.

What is you know?

My answers would have stayed the same had I known that at the outset.

People who are watching this, you would like to say to them that they are safer today in the United States than they were ten or twenty or thirty years ago, but we still have big risks.

I would say the following. I would say, we are safer today than we were yesterday. The threat landscape is heightened and everyone needs to be vigilant because what we have observed. If one takes a look at the domestic violence that has occurred, whether it is the tragic shooting in Buffalo, New York, in the supermarket, whether it is the July fourth parade in a suburb of Chicago, whether

So on the Secret Service.

Recently, I think a candidate running for president, Robert Kennedy's father was assassinated. They didn't have Secret Service protection. Then he has asked for Secret Service protection as.

In received that.

Who makes a decision or who gets Secret Service protection when you're running for president?

I do, And what we do is we have set up a process. We have a defined criteria in the process. The process provides for a bipartisan group of congressional leaders to make recommendations to me after they have analyzed the factors that we have established. This is a protocol that was established prior to the Trump administration, and so we resuscitated it.

It is a political it.

Is bipartisan, and the factors are a political and I have followed in each each instance the recommendation of the bipartisan group. There has been no light between or amongst us.

When I worked in the White House one hundred years ago or so, it was a president and the vice president got Secrets Art protection as they do now. But it seems as if a lot of White House aids and other people have Secret Service protection. It seems like it's proliferated. I mean, how do you decide who gets it, if you're a White House AID or not.

It is based on a threat assessment, and very sadly, the threat environment in which we are living is more acute.

What about baseball owners, so they need secretary protection?

You ever thought about that?

You know, if I recall my reading of the standings circa this morning, you are safe and secure since you're resting in first place.

Thanks for listening to hear more of my interviews. You can subscribe and download my podcast on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen