DHS Secretary Attempts to Redefine the Word ‘Secure’ to Avoid Border Critics

The Biden administration’s response to the burgeoning border crisis has been routinely criticized by Americans of all political stripes, and their latest attempts to defend themselves have been absurd, to say the least.

For instance, it was revealed last week that the White House was manipulating border data in order to give the impression of an improvement on their end, but only succeeded in making it more difficult for Border Patrol agents to do their job.

Now that the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is facing impeachment over the humanitarian disaster on the southern border, he’s gone so far as to suggest alternative definitions for what having a “secure border” actually entails.

In an interview with CNN host, and former Fox News host, Chris Wallace the secretary said that he was deeply concerned about being a “nation of immigrants” and insisted that there was more than one definition to the phrase “secure border.”

“Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border, to do everything that we can to support our personnel with the resources, the technology, the policies that really advance the security of the border, and do not come at the cost of the values of our country,” he said to Wallace.

“The law needs to be changed if it does not either meet our highest ideals or actually proves to be functional in the service of those ideals,” the secretary said.

Then came the most damning bits…

“What does ‘secure’ mean to you?” the host said.

“There is not a common definition of that,” the secretary said. “If one looks at [Congress’s 2006] statutory definition, the literal interpretation of the statutory language, if one person successfully evades law enforcement at the border, then we have breached the security of the border … Our goal is to achieve operational control of the border, to do everything that we can to support our personnel with the resources, the technology, the policies, that really advance the security of the border, and do not come at the cost of the values of our country. I say that because in the prior [Donald Trump] administration, policies were promulgated or passed that did not hew to the values that we hold dear.:”

“We, in the United States, have tremendous pride in our country as a country, a place of refuge. We are a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. Those laws provide for humanitarian relief for those who qualify. They also provide that individuals who do not qualify will be removed. That’s how we do our work at the Department of Homeland Security,” he said.

This sort of federal revisionism has long been a symptom of covering for failure, and there is little doubt that we can expect more of the same over the course of the next two years.