Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin just declared that every single migrant death during Biden's presidency could have been avoided.
The former GOP senator from Oklahoma went on Fox News Thursday and dropped a brutal assessment of the previous administration's border record, according to reports. Mullin told host Sean Hannity that Joe Biden possessed the exact same executive authority that President Trump is now using to lock down the southern border, but simply refused to act on it.
"So every single death that has occurred by an illegal that was released into this country underneath the Biden Administration, every one of those is 100% preventable," Mullin stated on air. He agreed with Hannity's framing that the previous administration has "blood on their hands" and praised American voters for putting Trump back in the White House.
Here's where it gets really juicy. The Biden team wasn't even caught off guard by the catastrophe unfolding at the border. They knew. A 2023 report from Immigration and Customs Enforcement laid bare the staggering numbers, and the administration still chose to sit on its hands.
That ICE report showed the backlog of undocumented individuals inside the country awaiting legal decisions had nearly doubled to over six million under Biden. Arrests of suspected terrorists and violent criminals also surged dramatically. Nearly every metric tracking unauthorized crossings climbed significantly throughout 2023.
The agency itself basically admitted it was drowning. ICE acknowledged that the flood of millions crossing the southern border had overwhelmed its operations, straining a workforce that hadn't grown in a decade. On the worst days, illegal crossings hit 12,000 or more per day at the Southwest border alone.
The detention numbers tell their own wild story. ICE held 36,845 people in custody by the end of fiscal year 2023, a 40 percent spike from the prior year. Meanwhile, the number of people released into the country without detention, typically handed court dates years into the future, ballooned 30 percent to more than 6.2 million. That figure nearly doubled the 3.26 million total from Trump's final year in office.
The fallout wasn't just a border state problem either. Cities thousands of miles from Mexico, like Chicago and New York, buckled under the pressure of absorbing massive numbers of new arrivals.
House Republicans were furious at the time. They refused to greenlight foreign aid packages for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan until Biden took meaningful action on border security, something they argued he could accomplish immediately through executive orders.
House Speaker Mike Johnson piled on, blasting the Biden administration for chatting with Mexican leaders about potential amnesty for DACA recipients while simultaneously ghosting congressional negotiations on border enforcement. The White House was literally discussing pathways for undocumented youth with Mexico's president while ignoring lawmakers trying to seal the border.
The whole saga reads like a masterclass in political malpractice. The tools were there. The authority existed. The data screamed for action. And according to the current DHS Secretary, the Biden administration simply looked the other way while people died.
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