A Republican-led House panel approved articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday for having “willfully and systematically” flouted federal immigration laws and breached the public trust.
The House Homeland Security Committee voted 18-15 along party lines for the two articles of impeachment, affirming that Mayorkas failed to detain migrants crossing the border before deciding whether to grant asylum.
The articles also state that the secretary ignored records requests from the committee and misled Congress about having “operational control” of the US border and maintaining that it is “secure.”
The marathon hearing, which dragged on for more than 15 hours, saw several procedural attempts by Democrats to tank the impeachment effort, with Republicans insisting that their year-long investigation had uncovered sufficient evidence that Mayorkas violated his oath of office.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) pledged on Friday to hold a floor vote on the articles “as soon as possible” after having released a memo earlier this month citing 64 times the Biden administration undermined US border security.
If passed in the narrowly divided House, Mayorkas would be the second Cabinet official impeached in US history — and the first since Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876.
Moderate Republicans have increasingly expressed willingness to move forward with the vote, with Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) telling reporters on Monday he now favored impeachment.
Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) pointed out that even Democratic members of Congress such as Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas and Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania had referred to Mayorkas’ handling of the border as a “crisis.”
He went on to note six reports released by majority committee staff on the “costs and consequences” of the Biden administration’s border policies and hearings with state attorneys general and grieving mothers — one’s daughter was murdered by an illegal alien; the other’s died of a fentanyl overdose.
Both sets of majority witnesses urged the House panel to impeach Mayorkas, whereas legal scholars called by the minority argued the secretary’s actions had not risen to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
“For almost a year, committee Democrats have turned a blind eye to the victims of the border crisis, while berating us for spending what they believed was too much time investigating Secretary Mayorkas’ handling of the border,” Green said in his opening remarks.
“If your refusal to obey the law leads to the death of your fellow citizens, you no longer deserve to keep your job, you’re breaking the people’s trust.”
In a letter hours before the hearing, Mayorkas denounced Green’s committee for making “politically motivated accusations and personal attacks” against him, while agreeing that the US immigration system was “broken.”
“We have provided Congress and your Committee hours of testimony, thousands of documents, hundreds of briefings, and much more information that demonstrates quite clearly how we are enforcing the law,” he wrote.
“Daily removals and returns are nearly double what they were compared to the pre-pandemic average from 2014 to 2019. The majority of individuals encountered at the Southwest Border throughout this Administration have been removed, returned, or expelled.”
Mayorkas and Democratic panel members said the Biden administration merely differed with House Republicans on immigration policy — and both urged the passage of a bipartisan Senate bill with border enforcement provisions.
Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) dismissed the proceedings as a “sham impeachment” and said Republicans had “failed to make a constitutionally viable case.”
“The sham impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas is a baseless political stunt by extreme MAGA Republicans,” Thompson said in his opening statement, before attacking the chairman and panel member who introduced the resolution.
“Chairman Green, Rep. Margaret [sic] Taylor Greene and others have pushed for and even fundraised based on this pre-planned, predetermined scapegoating of the secretary in a process akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) and others also accused former President Donald Trump of ginning up the process ahead of his 2024 run, which Johnson rejected in a Tuesday press conference as “absurd.”
“I have talked to former President Trump about this issue at length,” he told reporters. “He used his executive authority to get that system under control. President Biden came, reflexively, and did exactly the opposite. And that is what has caused this crisis.”
In early January, however, Mayorkas reportedly told CBP agents that 85% of migrants who enter the US illegally are later released into the country to await their asylum hearings, some of which are scheduled 10 years from now.
Another program for humanitarian parole lets 30,000 asylum seekers in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela through the nation’s legal ports of entry before their cases are adjudicated.
At least 1.5 million “gotaways” have also evaded detection by US immigration authorities when crossing the border.
Hundreds of others who have tried to enter between ports of entry have popped up on terror watchlists, CBP data show.
In total, more than 8.5 million migrants have been apprehended by US Customs and Border Protection since President Biden took office in January 2021 — with 7 million encounters occurring on the southern border.
Fentanyl overdose deaths have also spiked during the same period, National Institutes of Health data show, with the synthetic opioid being heavily trafficked into the US by Mexican cartels.
Asked about the border on Tuesday, Biden told reporters: “I’ve done all I can do.”
“Give me the power I’ve asked [for] from the very day I got in office. Give me the border patrol. Give me the people who can stop this and make it work,” he said, referencing negotiations over the $106 billion supplemental package that mostly includes military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
Senate Republicans have denounced a draft of the measure and Johnson has declared it “dead on arrival” in the House, with the speaker demanding that Biden sign an executive order ending “the mass release of illegals and dangerous persons into our country.”
