Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced on Monday that the rate of illegal aliens carrying diseases with them into the country is “approximately 20 percent,” even though many such illegals have not been properly tested, as reported by the New York Post.
“When one is speaking of 7,000 or 7,500 people encountered at the border every day,” Mayorkas said at a press conference, “if one takes a look at that system, it is not built for that in a COVID environment where isolation is required.”
Mayorkas did not expand on what he meant by “illness,” and whether he was referring to the Chinese coronavirus or other diseases. However, he did mention that he does not expect to see a “tragic rise in the Delta variant” (also known as the India variant) following the latest surge at the border, which saw over 10,000 illegals, mostly from Haiti, enter the country illegally.
In the latest border fiasco, roughly 15,000 illegals who crossed the border camped out under the Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas, and waited for federal immigration authorities to take them into custody, knowing that they would ultimately be released into the country’s interior. During their time under the bridge, they began setting up makeshift shelters that resembled shanty towns and homeless encampments, living in third-world conditions that allowed diseases to fester among them.
Mayorkas admitted that “we did not test that population of individuals” for COVID-19. “We do not know. I do not know, I should say, if I may be perfectly accurate; I do not know whether anyone was sick with COVID. We certainly had some individuals get sick, not specifically with COVID, to my knowledge, and we addressed their illnesses.”
The Biden Administration has since sent conflicting messages on what they planned to do with the illegals. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed that the illegals were “not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time,” and used this as an excuse to justify not testing them for COVID. However, Mayorkas subsequently admitted in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 of the illegals had been released into the country, while awaiting trial dates for their asylum claims.
The surge of Haitians and other illegals in recent weeks is just the latest in a consistent pattern of record-high border crossings, brought about by Joe Biden’s campaign promises to provide amnesty and taxpayer-funded benefits to all illegals who come into the country. Biden’s handling of the border, and numbers of illegals coming across that have not been seen in decades, has consistently been the one area on which his approval ratings are the lowest among all voters across the political spectrum.