“The border is closed,” asserted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during his testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. Despite the number of illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. over the past three months hitting record highs, Mayorkas insisted that there is no migrant “invasion.”

Mayorkas made his reality-denying claim in response to the arguments of Republican Congressman Chuck Fleischmann. “Frankly,” Fleischmann said, “it appears that President Biden’s message to one and all is the U.S. has no limits to who can come because the administration will not enforce any of its immigration laws. Is that the message, that this country will not enforce its immigration laws?”

“No, it’s not,” Mayorkas insisted. “The president could not have been clearer in his articulation of this administration’s position, nor could I have been clearer and continue to be so, which is the border is closed, and this administration administers and enforces the laws of the United States of America — and that is not only the laws of accountability but also the humanitarian laws that Congress passed years ago.”

To be honest, it may be difficult to determine what was the bigger lie uttered by Mayorkas — that “the border is closed,” or that Biden could not be clearer regarding his administration’s border enforcement. What is clear is that Mayorkas is bending the truth on both counts.

When pressed on the massive drop in the number of deportations despite the increase in illegal crossings, Mayorkas essentially played dumb. Of the deportation statistics reported by the the Washington Post, he declared, “I do not believe it is accurate,” though he could not or would not provide any specific numbers himself.

His testimony was classic political spin and obfuscation. Another example: “Enforcement is not a quantitative issue; it is a qualitative one. The question is as to whom are we dedicating our resources and what will deliver the greatest public-safety results for the American public, and that is what I am focused on.”

Mayorkas’s obvious intent was to dispel the reality of the current border crisis by pushing the false narrative that the Biden administration has effectively “closed the border.” But Republicans weren’t having any of it. Representative Steven Palazzo insisted, “It looks like you rolled out a big welcome mat that says ‘send us your kids,’ and that is criminal. Because as long as they know if they get to our border we’re going to take them and turn them into American citizens and let them roam free [in] our country, people desperate in those countries are going to continue to take the risk.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s border czar, Kamala Harris, has gone some 65 days without yet visiting the U.S. southern border, though she did famously find the suggestion that she do so quite hilarious. It appears that this strategy is because the Biden administration doesn’t want any media focus on the border crisis. Thus, Team Biden can play the game of blaming the massive illegal immigration problem not on lack of border enforcement but rather on the lack of funding for the Central American nations known as the Northern Triangle. Hence Harris’s announcement of a big “investment” to ostensibly address the problem at its source.

As Harris expressed to a group of Guatemalan leaders earlier this month, “I don’t need to tell you this — injustice is a root cause of migration. It is causing the people of the region to leave their homes involuntarily, meaning they don’t want to leave but they are fleeing. Women, Indigenous people, Afro-descendants, LGBTQ people are facing discrimination and persecution; families are living in fear of trafficking and gangs.”

The irony: They’re being trafficked into the U.S. by gangs.

If there is any clear message on the problem of illegal immigration coming from the Biden administration, it’s that it’s America’s fault people are illegally crossing the border in droves, because we haven’t “invested” enough in corrupt Central American countries. “Blame America First” is a particularly pernicious facet of Biden’s big border lie.