Blumenthal Votes to Confirm Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security

[WASHINGTON, D.C.] – U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) voted today to approve the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas to be Secretary of Homeland Security:

“A strong leader like Ali Mayorkas has never been more necessary at the Department of Homeland Security. He is taking the helm of DHS just days after a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol, mere weeks after discovering that a foreign adversary hacked into our cyber systems, and while hundreds of immigrant children orphaned by the Trump Administration for years are still waiting to be reunited with their families. Our nation is facing a myriad of security challenges, but as a bipartisan group of former DHS Secretaries wrote earlier this month, President Biden ‘could not have found a more qualified person’ to step into this role.”

“It was especially meaningful for me to vote for the first immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Ali’s mother fled the Holocaust just like my dad – they both arrived in the United States as refugees. While our families’ stories are not unique, someone with that personal experience running our national immigration system is.”

Earlier today, Blumenthal and U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro (TX-20), authors of the Families Belong Together Act, commended President Biden for taking action to begin reuniting families separated by the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy and urged the Biden Administration to make every effort to enable those families to be reunited in the United States. Blumenthal and Castro also announced plans to reintroduce their bicameral legislation to provide a path to citizenship to children and parents who were affected by the family separation crisis.

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