The truth comes out in private. DHS Secretary Mayorkas is fessing up to some lawmakers that he is frustrated about the decision by the CDC to approve ending the use of Title 42 at the southern border in private conversations. In public, Mayorkas is still claiming that his department has plans in place to handle the coming catastrophe in May when Title 42 ends and migrants flood the border.

Publicly, Mayorkas says that the Biden administration is coordinating with his department to do what they are incapable of doing now, without the dramatic increase of illegal migration predicted, which is keeping the southern border secure. Privately he is telling lawmakers he is concerned about how the administration is handling the hot button issue. In other words, he is talking out of both sides of his mouth. Mayorkas allegedly began speaking honestly with lawmakers during private conversations even before so many Democrats began to demand that Biden leave the policy in place until real plans are in place.

This is a cabinet member who doesn’t have confidence in his boss, the president, to lead the administration at a time when the southern border is in dire straits. Mayorkas is also frustrated in how the rollout of the decision to end Title 42 was handled. No one was on the same page when it came to answering questions. Biden has a bad habit of making sweeping announcements during press briefings without providing details. In this case, he told the press that the CDC gave the green light to end Title 42 – a pandemic mitigation tool that allows Border Patrol agents to immediately turn back illegal migrants – and then the rest of the people involved were left to scramble to answer questions about the decision. It is impossible to believe that the Biden administration can be this incompetent at every level. The Biden border crisis is intentional and a deliberate decision has been made to not secure the border.

A DHS spokesperson puts responsibility on the CDC while the White House continues to say that DHS has a plan.

DHS spokesperson Marsha Espinosa told Axios: “As Secretary Mayorkas has said repeatedly, Title 42 is a public health authority — not an immigration authority — and he defers to the public health experts at the CDC for any decisions related to it.

“As he has also repeatedly said, we anticipate an increase in migrant encounters after the lifting of Title 42, and he is leading a whole-of-government response to apprehend, process and remove from the country those who are not eligible for relief,” she said.

A White House official told Axios: “DHS has a plan and we’re working to implement it, and we will continue to work with Congress to implement the lifting of Title 42 in an as orderly and humane way as possible.”

As DHS well knows, the CDC doesn’t make policy but it does recommend measures be put in place, like Title 42, to mitigate public health concerns. In March 2020, the CDC recommended that the previous administration use Title 42 to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic at the southern border. It makes sense and more than 1.7M illegal migrants have been turned back at the border since it was implemented. DHS is responsible for managing the end of Title 42. That is a big ask of a department unable to handle the crisis now, much less by the time May rolls around and the number of migrants explodes. Mayorkas and Biden have shown no interest in what is happening in the Rio Grande Valley, or in the desert in Arizona, or even the small border New Mexico shares with Mexico. Border states have been left on their own to cope with the crisis.

Even before Democrats in tight re-election races began to sound the alarm over ending Title 42 at this time, before the 2022 midterm elections, lawmakers were not convinced that Mayorkas and his team have a plan.

In some instances, the secretary pointed members to the CDC, and said the public health agency is calling the shots.

Members and their staff told Axios that, after Mayorkas walked them through the DHS’ preparations for the potential border surge, they did not feel the administration had reached the level of preparedness needed to carry out the operation successfully by May 23.

Some of these private conversations took place before multiple House and Senate lawmakers began publicly criticizing the administration’s decision to repeal the border restrictions, and openly urged it to delay the repeal.

The pushback on lifting Title 42 is getting so strong from Democrats, not just Republicans, that Biden may be looking for a graceful way to save face and reverse his decision, at least temporarily. The administration is talking about possibly delaying the end of Title 42 for now, which means until after the November elections. Vulnerable Democrats, both moderates and progressives, are on record voicing opposition to Biden on this topic.

Mayorkas is sticking to his story this week during interviews. Beginning next week, he will be grilled by committees in both the House and the Senate about the Biden border crisis.

Mayorkas told CNN this week: “I say, No. 1, that we have plans; we are executing on those plans.”

“I think we have to be very mindful of the fact that we are addressing enemies, and those enemies are the cartels and the smugglers, and I will not provide our plans to them.

“We are going to proceed with our execution, carefully, methodically, in anticipating different scenarios,” he added.

All anyone has to do is turn on FNC any day and see with their own eyes the crisis playing out at the border. The other networks only cover the border crisis when they can gin up a phony narrative like when they claimed, without any evidence, that Border Patrol agents in the horse patrol were whipping Haitian migrants. That story was a complete fabrication yet the media outlets that are not FNC seized the narrative and ran with it, as did Biden, Harris, and Mayorkas. The Border Patrol agents have been vindicated yet there have been no apologies from any network or public official. Shocker, I know.