Exclusive — Sec. Markwayne Mullin: DHS Pushing Migrants Back Across Border, ‘We're Not Allowing Them to Claim Asylum Unless They Can Prove Asylum’

The Trump administration is not allowing migrants to claim asylum unless they can prove asylum, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during a policy event with Breitbart News.

Mullin talked about the phenomena of “gotaways” during the Biden administration, explaining that those are only the illegal migrants that we know about, “not the ones you see footprints of.”

“The numbers now in terms of land encounters, are down to like something like 10,000 a day, and the gotaways are down 99 percent,” Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle said during the discussion, asking, “What changed?”

“What changed between then and now, and why has this significantly dropped in the last two years?” he asked.

“One of the directions that we that we changed, or President Trump changed when he came in, was we switched to enforcement rather than humanitarian,” Mullin replied. “Now we still — enforcement is humanitarian, right? Because it’s inhumane to put people loose in the desert and expect for the border patrol to pick you up. It’s inhumane to allow a bunch of kids, 450,000 kids that are lost in this country, we recovered 150,000, just below 160,000.”

However, that means hundreds of thousands are still missing, and allowing that to continue is inhumane. He also detailed what he saw when he visited the border during the Biden administration, recalling how he witnessed people getting loaded up on cattle trailers.

“They let them all out to them. We go across the border. We catch them and they’re in the middle of really, really, remote area. It took us all day to get these individuals out. All day. When we got done, we’re coming back, and we crossed a whole slew of footprints. Those are the individuals — the one that got caught… They were trying to smuggle other people in” with drugs or terrorists, he said.

“We don’t count those as gotaways. So they were flooding the zone, and within an hour of each zone or each sector, they were taking border patrol out of commission because now their whole job is, as border patrol, is they’ve got to focus on the group that they’re in, and they can’t focus on the rest of the border or the rest of the sector,” he said, explaining this tactic.

“So while they’re providing humanitarian aid for these individuals, which was completely designed by the cartels, they’re distracted dealing with this. That would literally take their eight-hour or nine-hour shift, and then everything else was wide open behind them, and they knew no one was watching them. Now you take 1,800 miles, roughly, of the border, and you do that throughout the border. You can imagine how many people were flooding across,” Mullin said.

Trump ended this, he explained.

“What the president did is like, ‘No, we’re not.’ We’re going to catch them at the border and push them back across. We’re not allowing them to claim asylum unless they can prove asylum means by the letter of law,” Mullin said. “We’re not making it. This is what the law says. There’s certain things that are criteria for you to be able to meet asylum asylum cases.”

He added, “We started working with Mexico, saying the crisis is yours. It’s not us. We’re pushing them back across the border. They’re your issue.”

WATCH the entire event below: