Washington — Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said as his time at the helm of the nation’s immigration enforcement comes to a close that “a really terrific solution was killed by irresponsible politics” when the bipartisan border deal fell apart earlier this year. 

Mayorkas pointed to the agreement on a border package reached by a bipartisan group of Senate negotiators in February reached after months of deliberations that would have marked the first comprehensive border security policy overhaul in decades — and give the president far-reaching powers to clamp down on unlawful border crossings. But the bill was quickly rejected by Republicans after President-elect Donald Trump expressed his opposition. 

Following the legislation’s failure, the Biden administration instituted asylum restrictions that dramatically cut off the flow of immigration. When asked about the timing amid criticism from Republicans that the Biden administration possessed the authority without Congress to act on the border, Mayorkas acknowledged that the administration may have taken the action more quickly if they knew the border deal would be torpedoed. 

“Looking back now in hindsight, in 2020 if we had known that irresponsible politics would have killed what was clearly a meritorious effort and a meritorious result, perhaps we would have taken executive action more rapidly,” Mayorkas said in an interview that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”

The comments come as border crossings have dropped to the lowest level of the Biden administration, after reaching record highs a year ago. 

The Homeland Security Secretary noted that before Mr. Biden came into office, the “trend lines of migration” were increasing exponentially in 2018 and 2019 worldwide, “and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.” He added over time, the Biden administration built up capabilities that have allowed it to transport individuals and decompress areas seeing surges in immigration, saying that “we’ve been executing on enforcement at an unprecedented level throughout this administration.”

“We are now removing or returning more individuals in three years than the prior administration did in four, and we are doing so not only greater in volume, but greater in speed, because of the negotiations with other countries and to more countries than has ever been the case,” Mayorkas said.