By newsamericas – February 2, 2021
News Americas, WASHINGTON, D.C., Weds. Feb. 3, 2021: History was made in the US again yesterday as a Caribbean immigrant was for the first time confirmed and sworn in to head the Department of Homeland Security.
Havana, Cuba-born, Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas, was confirmed in the post by the US Senate, 56-43, despite strong opposition from Republicans. Mayorkas is also the first immigrant and the first Latino to hold the post, further solidifying President Joe Biden’s diverse Cabinet.
Shortly after his confirmation, Mayorkas was sworn in by another history maker, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants and the US’ first Black Caribbean American vice president, Kamala Harris.
Mayorkas, 61, will also stand at the center of Biden’s attempts to reverse many immigration restrictions put in place by Republican former President Donald Trump.
As secretary of the sprawling agency, Mayorkas will oversee a 240,000-employee department responsible for border security, immigration enforcement, cybersecurity and disaster readiness and relief, among other missions.
Mayorkas takes the helm at DHS just days after the department issued an advisory warning of a heightened threat of domestic extremist violence from people angry at Trump’s election defeat and inspired by the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
He also takes over at a time when immigrants and immigrant advocates are antsy about changes to the immigration conduct of the US ICE, another of the agencies coming under the purview of DHS.
FAST FACTS ABOUT MAYORKAS
Mayorkas came to the US with his parents and sister in the late 1960 as refugees, following the Cuban Revolution. He was 1-year-old at the time.
His father was of Cuban Jewish background and his mother a Romanian Jew, whose family had fled to Cuba. He and his family lived in Miami, Florida, before moving to Los Angeles, California, where he was raised for the remainder of his youth. Mayorkas would go on to college in California, earning his Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981. He then received his Juris Doctor from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles in 1985.
He then entered private practice, and after three years as a litigation associate became an Assistant United States Attorney in the Central District of California in 1989, where he prosecuted a wide array of federal crimes, developing a specialization in the prosecution of white collar crime From 1996 to 1998, Mayorkas also served as Chief of the Office’s General Crimes Section, overseeing the training and trial work of all new Assistant United States Attorneys in the Criminal Division.
In 1998, Mayorkas was recommended by Senator Dianne Feinstein and appointed by President Clinton as the United States Attorney for the Central District of California, becoming the first United States Attorney to be promoted to that position from within the office and the youngest United States Attorney in the nation. Mayorkas oversaw the prosecution of criminal cases of national significance, including the prosecution of the Mexican Mafia in death penalty proceedings.
In September 2001, Mayorkas returned to private practice, joining the international law firm of O’Melveny & Myers LLP as a litigation partner. In November 2008, Mayorkas was selected by the President-elect Barack Obama to lead the transition team responsible for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. In 2009, he was appointed by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate as the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. As the director, Mayorkas helped in implementing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) process in 60 days. In 2008, The National Law Journal named Mayorkas one of the “50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America.”
In December 2014, Mayorkas was promoted to the position of Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and later confirmed as the Deputy Secretary in December 2014 following a party line Senate vote. In 2015, Mayorkas traveled to Havana, Cuba, as the Obama Administration’s highest ranking Cuban American to negotiate the first-ever Homeland Security agreement between the two countries. The agreement was signed in May 2016.
After the Obama administration, Mayorkas joined Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP in November 2016 and resumed his representation of clients in their most significant and high-stakes litigation, internal investigations, and parallel proceedings. In 2019, Latino Leaders Magazine named him one of the 101 most influential leaders in the nation’s Latino community.
He lives with his wife and two of his three daughters in Washington, D.C.
