Joe Kernen Presses Alejandro Mayorkas Over ‘S-Show’ Biden Border Policy: ‘I’d Pass the Buck If I Were You’

CNBC’s Joe Kernen jumped on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his suggestion that there may have been internal “disagreements” about President Joe Biden’s southern border policies.

Mayorkas joined CNBC’s Squawk Box on Friday where Andrew Ross Sorkin first pressed him on whether, in hindsight, he should have approached the border issue differently.

Mayorkas said:

You have to understand something, and this is not specific to government, but to any large organization, including a government administration, people have different views on what the correct policies should be, what the correct operational measures should be. Those disagreements, those different views are voiced. Decisions are made. And then everyone marches in unity together. That is the nature of a large organization, and the government is no different.

Sorkin honed in on Mayorkas’s “disagreements” line and asked if the secretary had any personal opposition to how the border has been handled.

“Are you suggesting your own personal views about how to operate this were at odds? Or there was a distinction between your personal approach and how you would have wanted to do it and how maybe your bosses wanted to do it?” he asked.

“I don’t want to get into the deliberative process. We’re one team and it’s one effort,” Mayorkas answered. “But there is this is not a revolutionary concept that there are disparate views when one has many people involved in the decision making process.”

Kernen then jumped in and said Mayorkas’s answer “indicated” to him that those personal disagreements may exist and he encouraged him to “pass the buck” to avoid full responsibility for the “s-show” the border has become.

“You indicated to me that maybe you wouldn’t have halted “Remain in Mexico,” wouldn’t have paused the border wall construction, wouldn’t have relaxed deportation priorities, wouldn’t have rescinded the public charter — I would say that. Were you just following the orders from from the the people above you?” Kernen asked. “I’d pass the buck if I were you because it turned into an s-show, the whole thing, I mean, it quadrupled to almost 12 million versus 3 million illegal crossings.”

“First of all, I’m not a pass the buck guy,” Mayorkas shot back.

“I would,” Kernen said.

Mayorkas called it “not a noble approach to service” and argued problems at the southern border have been exacerbated due to the Covid-19 pandemic and growing global displacement.

“Let’s place the challenge of immigration that this country has faced in context,” he said. “And that’s in a global context because what we experienced at our southern border was not exclusive to our southern border. It is a phenomenon that many countries around the world, not only in our hemisphere experienced, because we have had the largest level of displacement in the world since World War II.”

Watch above via CNBC.

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