“We have said it repeatedly and we continue to warn people not to make the dangerous journey,” Mr. Mayorkas said in an interview on “Face the Nation.” “We saw so tragically in San Antonio, Texas, one of the potentially tragic outcomes of this dangerous journey, and so many people don’t even make it that far into the hands of exploitative smugglers. And we continue to enforce immigration law, as is our legal responsibility.” The minister said migrants traveling through Central America to the US-Mexico border are often given false information by smugglers encouraging them to attempt the journey. “They put their lives, their life savings, in the hands of these exploitative organizations, these criminal organizations that don’t care about their lives and are only after profit,” he said. The deaths of 53 migrants abandoned in the tractor trailer in the San Antonio heat appear to be the deadliest human trafficking case in modern US history. Federal charges have been filed against four people allegedly connected to the deaths. Mayorkas said the Biden administration is working closely with Mexico to break up caravans of migrants seeking to cross the border into the US and said dealing with the large number of migrant arrivals along the southern border is a “regional challenge that requires a regional response. “ “These are very sophisticated transnational criminal organizations. They have evolved over the last 30 years,” he said. “In the 90s I prosecuted them and they were much more rudimentary. Now, they are very sophisticated, they use technology and they are highly organized transnational criminal enterprises.” But Mayorkas said the US has also stepped up its efforts through technology and manpower, with border authorities rescuing more than 10,000 people this year. “Can a truck get through sophisticated media? Sometimes, yes,” he said. “But I have to say that we’ve interdicted more drugs at ports of entry than ever before. We’ve rescued more migrants. We see a challenge that’s truly regional, hemispheric in scope, and we’re dealing with it accordingly.” While the Biden administration continues to defend its immigration policy after record levels of immigration arrests in May and a deadly smuggling operation in Texas, it won from the Supreme Court on Thursday when justices cleared the way for the administration to unseat Trump . Policy of the “Stay in Mexico” era. Under the program established under former President Donald Trump, asylum seekers had to wait for their court proceedings outside the US. Mayorkas said the department is “pleased” with the decision and said the Stay in Mexico program has “endemic flaws” and an “unjustifiable human cost.”
