GOP prods Mayorkas over ‘ignorance’ of smuggling cartel tactics

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The House Homeland Security Committee is probing a breakdown in Homeland Security’s ability to share critical intelligence about border security after Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas showed an astonishing “ignorance” about how the smuggling cartels operate.

Mr. Mayorkas was confronted during a hearing earlier this year with the wristbands cartels make migrants wear, as a way of tracking them like cargo as they’re shipped across the U.S.-Mexico border and deeper into the U.S. He said he was unaware.

That startled Republicans who said they were in disbelief, given the pernicious nature of the tactic.

Rep. Mark Green, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said he’s worried it signals a bigger problem at the department.

“I was stunned when Secretary Mayorkas confessed to the Senate that he didn’t know about the cartels’ use of wristbands in smuggling operations,” the Tennessee Republican said. “Ignorance of this common practice further highlights his dereliction of duty and the administration’s failures to secure our borders.”

In a letter to Mr. Mayorkas on Monday, Mr. Green called the secretary’s answer “deeply troubling” and said a secretary must keep up with the situation at the border, including the tactics smugglers use to exploit a weakness in U.S. policies, while making billions of dollars for themselves.

“Your ignorance of such basic and readily public information suggests a breakdown in intra-agency intelligence sharing and that such basic information related to border enforcement is not conveyed to the Department’s leadership,” Mr. Green wrote.

Homeland Security, in a response to The Washington Times, defended the department’s efforts to reel in the smugglers.

“DHS has launched unprecedented campaigns, working with our allies, deploying new high-tech solutions, and leading investigations that are cracking down on criminal smuggling networks,” the department said.

Mr. Green’s inquiry comes as House Republicans are pondering next steps toward Mr. Mayorkas, with an eye toward impeachment.

The Homeland Security Committee has already produced a report accusing the secretary of dereliction of duty, pointing to federal laws governing border security that Mr. Mayorkas has flouted, and to multiple times the secretary seemed to give misleading answers to Congress or the public about the status of border security.

The wristbands have become a symbol of the cartels’ organizational strength, and of the dehumanizing treatment the migrants are subjected to.

News accounts about the wristbands began to surface in March 2021, just as the Biden border migrant surge was beginning, though Homeland Security told reporters they’d started seeing the color-coded bracelets in 2020.

Analysts said the bracelets were probably being used to help the smugglers keep track of who was going where, or perhaps who had already paid for their trip and who still owed money.

At a hearing last month Jaeson Jones, a former captain of intelligence and counterterrorism at the Texas Department of Public Safety, held up a handful of the colored bracelets he said came from the Gulf Cartel, which controls the territory south of Brownsville, Texas.

“What I’m holding in my hand before you today, I want to be very clear, this is America’s new slave trade,” Mr. Jones told the Homeland Security Committee.

The cartels charge a piso, or tax on nearly every migrant who jumps the border — the Border Patrol nabbed nearly 133,000 last month — and that money fuels the organization. But with prices sometimes exceeding $15,000 for the trip, migrants oftentimes can’t pay it all.

They then go into what Mr. Jones called “debt bondage,” working off what they owe by drug trafficking for the cartels, or helping smuggle more people, or in some instances they may even be trafficked for sex. Others take regular jobs but have to make payments to the cartel’s operatives.

Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, confronted Mr. Mayorkas with a photo of the bracelets in March. He’d intended to use the bracelets to set up another question, but he was too taken aback when Mr. Mayorkas said he didn’t know what they were.

Mr. Cruz said he was “stunned” by the interaction, and wondered later whether the secretary was actually telling the truth about his ignorance of the tactic.

Mr. Green, in his letter Monday, said for Mr. Mayorkas to be unaware represents a “failure” at the department, either because the tactic wasn’t noticed or, if it was, it never made its way to Mr. Mayorkas’ desk.

The chairman asked Homeland Security to turn over all documents that came to his office that mentioned the wristbands.

“Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden should be ashamed for empowering the cartels’ deadly business model,” Mr. Green said. “While Secretary Mayorkas remains willfully unaware of the work of these violent transnational criminal organizations, this Committee and the American people know the truth.”