And is afflicted by cognitive dissonance

By George Fishman on June 20, 2024

Summary

• In order to make the case for his June “Securing the Border” rule — “urgently needed to avert significant public harm” — DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had no choice but to admit to the harm caused by the mass release of aliens apprehended at the border. He had to disavow positions he has consistently taken, positions grounded in his “detention is morally inexcusable” mindset.
• Consequently, the narrative of the rule reads like a case-study in cognitive dissonance — “the unpleasant mental state that may result if someone really does have certain beliefs but thinks or acts in a way that contradicts them”.
• Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives impeached Secretary Mayorkas in part precisely because his “unlawful mass release of apprehended aliens … ha[s] enticed an increasing number of aliens to make the dangerous journey to our Southwest border”. Mayorkas has long known the deleterious effects of mass release. But this rule is the first time I know of that he has actually admitted the harm.
• Mass release creates a de facto open border, which is at the core of the alien smugglers’ open-border narrative that Secretary Mayorkas has long attacked as a lie. In actuality, the smugglers have been more truthful about the state of the border than has Mayorkas and he needed to admit to the truthfulness of their narrative, to admit that their “lies” were in fact true. But this made Mayorkas uncomfortable, so elsewhere in the rule he seemed to implicitly question the narrative or even return to calling the smugglers liars.
• There is another explanation for the peculiar manner in which the rule was written. It is possible that Secretary Mayorkas never even read the rule that he signed. If so, the staff tasked with writing the rule was simply trying to perform an incredibly difficult balancing act: justifying the rule by admitting where necessary to inconvenient truths, while also not too openly contradicting past statements by their boss.

Read more here:

https://cis.org/Fishman/Justify-His-New-Border-Rule-Mayorkas-Fesses-Harm-Caused-His-Mass-Releases