Critics have long asserted that, despite claims to the contrary, President Joe Biden's open borders policies were a choice, and the resultant flood of illegal immigration over the past few years was both preventable and unnecessary.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas effectively confirmed those criticisms as true when he acknowledged that Biden's recent executive actions to reduce illegal migration and strengthen the border could have been implemented months or even years earlier, Breitbart reported.

Rather unsurprisingly, though, the senior official of the Democratic administration found a way to repeatedly attempt to blame Republicans in Congress for the disastrously failed border security and immigration policies the White House pursued for several years.

Mayorkas admitted that tough border action could have happened sooner

DHS Sec. Mayorkas appeared Sunday on CBS News's "Face the Nation" for a lengthy and wide-ranging interview with host Margaret Brennan, who at one point noted the record-high immigration numbers for the first few years of President Biden's tenure followed by recent near-record lows after Biden issued a series of tough executive orders to address the border crisis during the election cycle.

Mayorkas delivered a long-winded response that sought to blame the previously high numbers of illegal border crossings on the COVID-19 pandemic and global trends of higher-than-average migration.

He also attempted to blame the "irresponsible politics" of congressional Republicans for the massive flood of illegal migrants granted entry into the country by the administration, in that they rejected multiple DHS requests for supplemental funding and opposed purportedly bipartisan border legislation.

However, Mayorkas perhaps inadvertently admitted that action to secure the border could have been pursued much earlier when he said, "Looking back now in hindsight, in 20/20 [vision], if we had known that irresponsible politics would have killed what was clearly a meritorious effort and a meritorious result, perhaps we would have taken executive action more rapidly."

To her credit, Brennan pointed out the fraudulence of Mayorkas' blame-shifting to Congress by noting how the recent reduction in illegal migration "suggest that there is the ability to do it without Congress acting, right? That's the downside of showing you can make it work," to which the secretary replied, "Yes, but," and launched into several other excuses for the administration's failed policies.

Biden border policies part of a "deliberate plan"

In reaction to everything Sec. Mayorkas said in the interview, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Ira Mehlman, told Breitbart, "This was not incompetence. This was a deliberate plan to remake the country through immigration … they were trying to create a situation where they thought they could force the Republicans to capitulate and basically codify open borders."

As for that purported bipartisan border security bill that Mayorkas repeatedly accused Republicans of killing, Mehlman said, "It was the bill’s own deep, deep flaws that killed it," and further explained, "It was not an immigration enforcement bill. It was a complete subterfuge -- it basically codified what was going on already. Everything would have been legal at that point, so it still would have had the same deleterious effects on the American people, and that’s why it was killed."

He further suggested that Mayorkas "is not crazy, he’s just ideologically driven," and has "for the past four years carried out these progressive policies, and nobody was there [in the administration] to say, 'Stop!'"

Mehlman added that the latest actions and remarks from Mayorkas were little more than the senior official "trying to make sure that, you know, he doesn’t take the blame" for the unacceptable failures of the Biden administration's lax enforcement policies on pre-existing border security and immigration laws.

Increased migration used as leverage to force GOP to vote for bad border bill

Per Breitbart, Mehlman's accusations against Mayorkas were echoed by Rosemary Jenks, a co-founder of the Immigration Accountability Project, who said of the Biden administration, "They opened the borders because they wanted to flood the country," though she acknowledged that she had "no evidence that anyone at DHS, including Mayorkas," used the increased migration to pressure Senate Republicans until the end of 2023.

Of the terrible border bill that would have codified the open borders policies, she added, "I think they saw an opportunity at the end of 2023 and thought, 'Oh, hey, you know, regardless of what we do in the elections, maybe we can tie the next administration’s hands with these dumb Republicans in the Senate.'"