Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded there have been “cases” where the national government delivered migrants at the US-Mexico border into the country without first testing them for the coronavirus.
During a meeting with the House Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde grilled Mayorkas on the issue, noticing that the US necessitates that all international explorers show they’d tried negative for COVID-19 inside three days prior to entering the country.
“There gives off an impression of being a more tolerant norm for foreign national crossing our border wrongfully than for American residents,” Clyde charged.
“Would you be able to guarantee the American people that nobody who has been captured is delivered into our communities with the — that actually test positive for COVID-19?”
Mayorkas answered that “There were times prior when people were caught and we tried to oust them, and we couldn’t remove them, and we were constrained to deliver them, and we didn’t have the chance to address them.”
He added: “We have tended to that circumstance.”
The Republican senator pushed back, calling attention to at any rate two occasions in Brownsville, Texas and Yuma, Arizona where migrants that had tried positive for the virus were delivered into those communities.
“There were occurrences in which people were delivered,” Mayorkas conceded accordingly.
The DHS head said those examples had brought about “extra works on” being ordered by the agency “to plug any opening.”
“It is our strategy to test people who are caught in the middle of the ports of passage, and if truth be told they test positive, to quarantine them,” Mayorkas said.