The YPU hosted former DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to debate Resolved: America Needs Deportation. Student speakers on both sides challenged him.
Mayorkas addresses the YPU in Sterling-Sheffield-Strathcona Hall. (Credit: Michelle Zheng)
Michelle Zheng
Managing Editor, The Buckley Beacon
Former Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the Yale Political Union that the United States must keep the power to deport, even as he conceded that “there are unjust deportations.”
“To be clear,” Mayorkas told the Union, “today I advocate in support of the proposition that the United States must have the legal authority to deport an individual.”
The resolution before the Union was Resolved: America Needs Deportation. Mayorkas opened in the affirmative by calling it ambiguous. He spent the rest of the night arguing that a country without the power to remove people, in effect, has no border. He then closed by conceding that the system is broken, slow and, at times, unjust.
Born in Havana in 1959, Mayorkas came to the United States as a child the following year. He was U.S attorney in Los Angeles under President Bill Clinton. Under President Obama, he directed U.S citizenship and immigration services, where he oversaw the rollout of DACA, and then served as deputy secretary of Homeland Security.
As secretary from 2021 to 2025, the first immigrant and first Latino to lead the department, he oversaw the border during the largest number of migrant encounters at the U.S Mexico border in 20 years. House Republicans impeached him in February 2024, accusing him of failing to enforce immigration law and misleading Congress. The senate dismissed both articles on April 17, 2024, in party-line votes. He is a resident fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics this fall.
His record as DHS secretary shadowed the debate. Students on the right pressed him on the border under his watch, while those on the left challenged the case for deportation itself.
Mayorkas built his case from first principles: sovereignty, territorial borders and the social contract. He quoted President Ronald Reagan’s description of America as a nation of immigrants, then added, “As we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws.”
He did not defend the current law as a good law. The limits set by Immigration and Nationality Act “need to be revisited,” he said. “They were last codified 30 years ago. Yet the world has changed over these past three decades.” But, he continued, “the limits now in place need to be obeyed.”
He rejected the idea of open borders as an ideal that “does not comport with or even recognize the reality in which we live.” Housing, hospitals and schools, he argued, cannot absorb unregulated migration. He pointed to New York City between 2022 and 2024, when tens of thousands of migrants arrived, some on buses sent by other states’ governors, in a city already short of housing.
Obedience to the law, he said, “requires the power to enforce the law,” and the main tool is removal. “Without that authority, our borders are virtually erased.”
The floor pressed him on his own record. One student asked how an administration committed to the rule of law had allowed millions of migrants into the country. Mayorkas answered that his administration believed in the right, written into U.S law, to claim asylum on arrival at the border.
Asked whether he backed the Trump administration’s mass deportations, he began with what he called a point of unanimity: “our immigration system is fundamentally broken.” With limited resources, he said, an agency must use discretion the way a prosecutor does. “I will focus the allocation of resources on those individuals who are unlawfully present in the United States and pose a threat to public safety.”
On whether people may resist laws they consider unjust, he drew a line. “It is our responsibility to react appropriately, but within the bounds of the law,” he said, pointing to the courts and the vote.
One student made a remark about enforcement becoming a “paper tiger.” Mayorkas said he doubted most people, whatever their politics, would describe that way today. When part of the room hissed, he stopped. “I am very interested in understanding why my remark just received some hiss,” he said and invited someone to explain.
A student from the Party of The Left answered that enforcement was aggressive against a few heavily publicized targets while thousands of undocumented workers were left in slaughterhouses, farms and factories because their labor benefits large employers. Mayorkas responded that his department had shifted worksite enforcement away from rounding up workers and toward the employers who exploit them.
The students then debated the matter.
Conservative party member Carlos Perez, arguing in the affirmative, made an economic case, citing the 2016 National Academy of Sciences study. Its estimated $54 billion annual gain to native-born Americans, he said, was about three-tenths of one percent of native income, while wage effects shifted roughly $500 billion from competing workers to their employers. Then he turned to the guest. “I’m quite happy to stand on the same side of this debate as former Secretary Mayorkas, and I welcome his conversion. But for millions of Americans, vague platitudes about immigration enforcement aren’t enough.”
Pressed on families with U.S.-citizen children, Perez said he did not want to separate families but that the state has “an obligation” to remove those who entered illegally, with “a few exceptions.” Asked to clarify, he went further: “I do not think it’s necessarily immoral for an illegal immigrant who happens to have U.S. citizen children to be deported.”
Corinne Cowan, also a member of the Conservative party, mentioned Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address and its call for a “political religion” of reverence for the law. Illegal immigration, she argued, “dilutes the power” of that civic faith and of the distinction of citizenship.
Massimo Mejia, Chairman of the Progressive party, responded to Cowan’s remarks in a rebuttal. He asserted that “the American nation was not founded upon a deep-seated respect for law, but the fear of the law,” and that the American mission, grounded in the proposition that all men are created equal, extends universally.
Beatrix Lozach of The Party of The Left opened with the story of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old detained with his father in Minnesota on Jan. 20. “Social media virality should not be a prerequisite for due process,” she said. The Fifth and 14th Amendments protect every “person,” she noted, “not citizen,” yet the government does not provide lawyers in removal proceedings. She proposed extradition, which requires a crime recognized in both countries, as the tool for gang members instead of deportation.
Mayorkas used his closing remarks to answer the opposition directly. “I do not consider a deportation in and of itself a threat to due process,” he said. Many people in the system, he argued, have had competent counsel and “an abundance of due process” before their claims were denied.
Then he conceded ground. “We need to be clear. There are unjust deportations,” he said. “There are unjust methods by which immigration laws are enforced. We have seen that,” with “tragic and calamitous” effects in recent months. “Nevertheless, the fact of an unjust deportation does not translate to the fact that we should not have any deportation.”
After the debate, when the Beacon asked, Mayorkas declined to comment on specific immigration policies under the Trump administration.
The resolution passed, 86-27, with four abstentions.