REPORTER: Mr. Secretary, so you’ve stated repeatedly that this is a challenge, but last month you were recorded privately saying that what’s been happening along the border is unstable and that there is a crisis. So, I’m asking, “Would you publicly admit right now —

MAYORKAS: You know, I’ve got to — I’ve got to — I’m going to stop right there. Let me just say very clearly: We are focused on meeting the challenge. We are focused on mission.

BUCK: The challenge of getting as many illegal immigrants into the country by bending and bending over backwards when it comes to U.S. law. Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. This is Buck. That was DHS Secretary Mayorkas. And what you have to know, you have to filter everything they say about the crisis at the southern border through a very specific lens.

That is, the Biden administration — because of the open-borders Democrat left, because of The Squad and because of the progressive vanguard within the Democrat Party that’s calling a lot of the shots — they don’t want the same outcome that you would think they would want when it comes to the border based on their pretense that there’s law and order as a concept that we all share.

We all want the same thing, Clay, at the border — except we don’t, because they benefit from this politically and the problem that they have is not one of lawlessness. It is not the enriching of the cartels through this whole process. Remember, migrants have to pay whether they get turned away or not once they get taken to the border.

Migrants have to make the cartels more powerful and influential in Mexico and the transfer lines that are set up here regardless. But Clay, all this is going on. And the issue for the Democrats is one of optics. It’s not people are scheming our system, gaming our system, getting around the immigration laws, taking advantage of the goodness of the American people.

It’s this looks bad. We better get those drones out of their airspace over there ASAP, because the American people are seeing what the Biden administration’s foreign policy… Not foreign policy. Well, it is kind of a foreign policy issue, but border policy looks like.

CLAY: Well, and also remember AOC showing up in that all-white outfit and having her photo taken with her hand raised with the kids that were in the Border Patrol cages supposedly created by the Trump administration that actually were created under the Obama administration. And I think the essence of this is what should be getting hammered home time after time.

And I wonder on some level when all of the crises that are befalling the Biden administration right now actually help in regards to the chaos at the border, because there’s so much askew, there’s so much adrift in terms of what we are doing right now as a country, Buck, that any one failure doesn’t stand out. Does that make sense?

It’s not like there’s one bad thing and everybody can focus on that. There are so many incompetences going on right now in the Biden administration, including Joe Biden himself. And we haven’t even hardly talked about the U.N. speech because it was such a nonentity in many ways in terms of actually saying anything. But there’s a lot of distractions. Does that make sense?

BUCK: Yeah, of course!

CLAY: There are so many bad things, people don’t even pay attention to the border.

BUCK: We are getting numb to the dumbness of the Biden administration. We’re seeing so much go on here that you say, “How could they make…?” But, see, this is why I think the border is so critical, Clay. They say it’s a “challenge,” and they’re right insofar as it’s a challenge of optics for left-wing socialist Democrats. (chuckles)

It’s a crisis to you and me and the people listening who want an orderly, rule-of-law-based immigration system, who want rule of law at our southern border. It’s a crisis to those people. We don’t see this the same way, left and right, Democrats and Republicans, the Biden administration and conservatives in this country.

It’s not just that the outcome is a little bit different here but we’re ultimately trying to get to the same place. They have a fundamentally different vision of what America’s immigration policy should be, and it’s “Bring in as many people from the developing world as possible so they will vote Democrat.”