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- 1,448 Department Of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas
DHS Secretary Mayorkas Testifies In Senate Hearing. of 25....
- U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is ...
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is...
- 1,448 Department Of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas
- Overview
- Early life and law career
- Service in the Obama administration and leadership of the Department of Homeland Security
Alejandro Mayorkas (born November 24, 1959, Havana, Cuba) is the secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security (2021– ). He is a former federal prosecutor and served in other high-ranking federal positions during Pres. Barack Obama’s administration (2009–17). In January 2024 the Republican-led House of Representatives advanced two ...
Mayorkas was born in Havana in November 1959, less than a year after the dictator Fulgencio Batista was ousted from power by the Fidel Castro-led Cuban Revolution. Mayorkas’s mother, Anita Mayorkas (née Gabor), was a Romanian Jew whose family had immigrated to Cuba in the 1940s after first fleeing to France to escape the Holocaust. In Cuba she met his father, Carlos (later Charles; better known as “Nicky”) Mayorkas, a Cuban-born Jew, whose parents were of Turkish and Polish origin and who had studied at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. At the time of Alejandro’s birth, his father owned and operated a steel-wool mill on the outskirts of Havana. In 1960 the family (including Mayorkas’s elder sister, Cathy) decamped for Miami, as did many other affluent Cubans who were concerned about their future under Castro’s revolutionary government. Later the family moved to Beverly Hills, California, where one of Nicky Mayorkas’s cousins had offered him a job as the bookkeeper of a textile company.
After a childhood that was less affluent than his family’s location in Beverly Hills may suggest, Alejandro Mayorkas earned a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley (1981), and then received a law degree from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles (1985). Following several years of private practice, he went on to work at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, one of the Justice Department’s largest districts, where he came to be viewed as one of the office’s best trial lawyers, as his former boss told The Washington Post in 2021. Among other white-collar cases, he prosecuted Heidi Fleiss, the “Hollywood Madam,” operator of an upscale prostitution ring, for tax evasion.
Mayorkas worked in private practice during George W. Bush’s presidency (2001–09). In 2009 Pres. Barack Obama appointed him to lead U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Mayorkas was praised for the speedy launch of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, among other achievements. But he was accused of intervening in a visa program on behalf of wealthy foreign investors. The DHS inspector general found that Mayorkas had “created an appearance of favoritism and special access,” though he had not broken any laws.
In 2013 Mayorkas became the deputy secretary of DHS, the first foreign-born person ever to run the department. He visited Cuba in 2015, as part of the Obama administration’s broader effort to overhaul U.S. relations with the country.
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Mayorkas returned to private practice during Donald Trump’s presidency (2017–21). In November 2020 he was nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to head DHS. He was confirmed by the Senate in February 2021, but the 56–43 vote was the tightest for any Biden nominee up to that point. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a fellow Cuban American but one known for his hawkish stance toward the island, criticized Mayorkas for what Rubio characterized as his plans to “undo the sensible protections put in place by the Trump Administration.”
As the head of DHS, Mayorkas oversaw the creation of a task force charged with reuniting families that had been separated at the southern border under Trump’s administration. As of early 2023 some 600 children had been reunited with their parents, but another 1,000 remained separated.
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Feb 5, 2021 · Jay Janner, American-Statesman / USA TODAY NETWORK. Department of Homeland Security chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, in white, walks along side Texas governor Greg Abbott after President Biden lands...
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