Not quitting, declares border agency’s chief – Arkansas Online
WASHINGTON — The Customs and Border Protection commissioner said Friday that he refused to resign after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requested his ouster a day after the midterm elections.
The commissioner, Chris Magnus, who oversees much of the customs and trade policy and the country’s borders, said Mayorkas and the department’s deputy secretary asked him to resign or face being the first political appointee to be fired by President Joe Biden. Magnus has been in the position for less than a year.
“I want to make this clear: I have no plans to resign as CBP Commissioner,” Magnus said in a written statement. “I didn’t take this job as a resume builder. I came to Washington, D.C. — moved my family here — because I care about this agency, its mission, and the goals of this Administration.”
Magnus, 62, plans to go to work Monday, he said. He added that the department already cut off his access to its Twitter account.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment.
Biden nominated Magnus in April 2021 to lead Customs and Border Protection, an agency with more than 60,000 border agents, customs officers and other employees who patrol the nation’s ports and borders and oversee billions of dollars in cross-border trade and travel. The Senate confirmed Magnus in December.
Magnus arrived with a reputation as a seasoned leader and reformer. He had served mostly in smaller law enforcement settings, as police chief in Fargo, N.D., Richmond, Calif., and Tucson, Ariz., where he took over in 2016.
He is also the first openly gay commissioner of the agency.
The commissioner promised during his confirmation hearing to take a nonpartisan approach to enforcing immigration laws and told senators in prepared testimony that he was a “pragmatic and bipartisan problem-solver.”
Immigration is also personal, he said. His father was an immigrant from Norway, and his husband, Terrance Cheung, came to the United States from Hong Kong.
Magnus also acknowledged during his confirmation hearing the difficulties he’d face at Customs and Border Protection. Immigrant advocates constantly criticize the agency and say it abuses its authority, while the Border Patrol’s labor union openly supported the Trump administration’s more restrictive immigration policies and complained loudly when the Biden administration tried to rescind them.
Magnus said he was told that Mayorkas had lost confidence in him and Biden will support the secretary.
Just a few months into the Biden administration, the number of illegal crossings at the southwestern border started to increase and have since broken records, drawing relentless Republican criticism.
Sixteen House Republicans wrote Biden on Nov. 1 — demanding that he call for Magnus’ resignation, citing a Politico report portraying him as an isolated, disengaged leader who sometimes nodded off during meetings.
Magnus told the news outlet that he experienced spells of fatigue as a side effect of multiple sclerosis, a neurological condition with which he was diagnosed 15 years ago, and adjusted his medication to address those effects. But Magnus said in his statement Friday he had much more to do at the agency.
“I haven’t been afraid to ask ‘why’ things are done in certain ways and want to continue to do so,” he said. “In addition to focusing on Border security and critical issues associated with irregular immigration, I’m also committed to carrying out common-sense law enforcement reforms to improve the agency’s culture and our standing with the public — while still respecting and supporting our workforce as they carry out our important mission.”
Border Patrol agents have contended with a historic migration surge since Biden took office, and the 2.7 million border arrests last fiscal year, mostly at the Mexican border, were a record high.
House Republicans have said they plan to impeach Mayorkas if they take control of the House. They blame him for what they see as a lack of control at the southwestern border.
Mayorkas is scheduled to appear before several congressional committees next week.
Information for this article was contributed by Eileen Sullivan of The New York Times and by Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti of The Washington Post.