Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took a trip to the border at the Rio Grande Valley last month, not to solve the crisis his department has created, but to feign concern over it.

Amid collapsing approval ratings, the Biden administration is attempting to toughen its message at the border, but not its policies.  During his trip, Mayorkas posed with Border Patrol agents and vowed to enforce immigration law.

"The United States continues to enforce its immigration laws, and restrictions at our Southwest border have not changed," Mayorkas said.  "The bottom line is that U.S. borders are not open."

Officials throughout the administration, including Mayorkas, have said the border is not open and that illegal aliens are subject to deportation, but their actions don't match their words.  Deportations have plummeted under Joe Biden's leadership, with just over 59,000 deportations reported during the last fiscal year, compared to over 180,000 deportations that were reported during the final year of the Trump administration.

One million illegal aliens were admitted into the country during the Biden administration's first year, according to a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).  The surge in illegal immigration over the past year and a half has been caused by Biden's campaign promises to provide mass amnesty for illegal aliens and to dismantle the nation's border security, as well as the actions taken by his administration that have backed up those promises.

Mayorkas's visit also came right before the expected end of the Trump-era Title 42 order that allowed agents to swiftly return large numbers of border crossers.  Biden's move is expected to further intensify the border crisis, with some estimating that 18,000 illegal aliens will begin crossing the border every day.

The Biden administration has been bailed out of its own incompetence for the time being thanks to a ruling from district court judge Robert Summerhays, who recently entered an injunction to prevent the White House from ending the use of Title 42 at the border for now.  But the Biden administration is appealing that ruling, and eventually, the use of Title 42 at the border will come to an end.

Having announced the end of the use of Title 42 at the border in early April, this administration has had plenty of time to develop a plan to deal with the coming influx of illegal aliens at the border, and it has offered nothing but empty rhetoric.  Biden's people have continued to support amnesty for illegal aliens while billing taxpayers millions of dollars on a daily basis for a border wall that they refuse to build.

Mayorkas is now pretending to stand with the men and women of the Border Patrol, but when those men and women needed him to have their backs in the face of bad-faith political attacks last year, he threw them under the bus and ran them over with it.

After initially defending Border Patrol agents falsely accused of whipping Haitian migrants, Mayorkas joined in on the White House's smear campaign and allowed the falsely accused agents to be subjected to a punishing investigation.  The falsely accused agents have had their careers upended and have been relegated to desk duty for almost nine months now.

The agents still may be fired, and there still has been no apology from the White House or the DHS.  So, when Mayorkas poses for a photo with Border Patrol agents and pretends to support their work, it is nothing but partisan political hypocrisy.

Ultimately, Mayorkas is going to have to do more than take photo ops at the border and send stern tweets to stop the catastrophe that is coming.  If Biden and Mayorkas were serious about securing the border, they could fully implement the court-ordered Remain in Mexico policy, finish the border wall, and keep the Title 42 order in place for the near future.  But they won't, because they're not serious.  Despite a recent shift in tone, the Biden administration remains as committed to its anti-borders project as ever.

William J. Davis is a communications associate for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.  

Image: Screen shot from KSAT/ABC12 News, video on YouTube.