The House of Representatives voted early Wednesday toward advance the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for a “willful and systematic” refusal to enforce the law and for allowing the U.S.-Mexico border to fall into cause.
Border security has become a top 2024 election issue.
The Homeland Security Committee debated all day Tuesday and well into the night before recommending two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas to the full House, a rare charge against a Cabinet official unseen in nearly 150 years, as Republicans make GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s hard-line deportation approach to illegal immigration their own.
The committee split along party lines; Republicans voted in favor, while the Democrats unified against, 18-15.
“We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer,” said Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn.
With an unusual personal appeal, Mayorkas — who is involved in Senate talks on a border security package — wrote in a letter to the committee that it should be working with the Biden administration to update the nation’s “broken and outdated” immigration laws for the 21st century, an era of record global migration.
“We need a legislative solution and only Congress can provide it,” Mayorkas wrote in the pointed letter to the panel’s chairman.
Rarely has a Cabinet member faced impeachment’s bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and Democrats on the panel dismissed the proceedings as a political stunt that could set a chilling precedent for other civil servants snared in policy disputes by lawmakers who disagree with the president’s approach.
“This is a terrible day for the committee, the United States, the Constitution and our great country,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee’s ranking Democrat.
The House’s proceedings against Mayorkas have created an oddly split-screen Capitol Hill, as the Senate works in secret with the secretary on a bipartisan border security package that is on life support.
The package being negotiated by the senators with Mayorkas could emerge as the most consequential bipartisan immigration proposal in a decade. Or it could collapse in political failure as some Republicans and Democrats criticize the efforts.
Trump, on the campaign trail and in private talks, has tried to squelch the deal. “I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill,” Trump said over the weekend in Las Vegas.
President Joe Biden, in a total reversal from previous statements, said if Congress sends him a bill with emergency authority he’ll “shut down the border right now” to get illegal immigration under control.
The Republicans are focused on the secretary’s mishandling of the southern border, which has experienced a huge surged in illegal immigrants over the past year, many using well known legal loopholes or security lapses to get into the country at time when drug cartels are using the border with Mexico to traffic people and ship deadly fentanyl into the states.
Rep, Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., a Trump ally often mentioned as a possible vice presidential pick, called it an “invasion.”
Republicans contend that the Biden administration and Mayorkas either got rid of policies in place under Trump that had controlled illegal immigration, such as Title 42, or enacted policies of their own that encouraged migrants from around the world to come to the U.S. illegally via the southern border.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Biden and Mayorkas have “created a catastrophe” on the border, and he criticized the emerging Senate package. The GOP leader said the president is now trying to turn the blame back on Congress for failing to update immigration laws.
The Republicans also accused Mayorkas of lying to Congress, pointing to comments about the border being secure or about vetting of Afghans airlifted to the U.S. after military withdrawal from their country.
“It’s high time” for impeachment, said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who called Mayorkas the “architect” of the border problems. “He has what’s coming to him.”
The House impeachment hearings against Mayorkas sprinted ahead in January while the Republicans’ separate impeachment inquiry into Biden over the controversial international business dealings over his son Hunter Biden has slowed.
Mayorkas never testified on his own behalf during the impeachment proceedings, but instead sent a letter that drew on his own background as a child brought to the U.S. by his parents fleeing Cuba and on his career spent prosecuting criminals.
“Your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me” from public service, he wrote.
Green, the Republican committee chair, disparaged Mayorkas’s letter as an “11th-hour response” to the committee that was “inadequate and unbecoming of a Cabinet secretary.”
It’s unclear if Republicans will have the support from their ranks to go through with the impeachment vote in the full House, especially with their slim majority and with Democrats expected to vote against it.
Last year, eight House Republicans voted to shelve the impeachment resolution proposed by Greene, though many of them have since signaled being open to it. The committee approved a revised version.
If the House does agree to impeach Mayorkas, the charges would next to go the Democrat-controlled Senate. In 1876, the House impeached Defense Secretary William Belknap over kickbacks in government contracts, but the Senate acquitted him in a trial.
The Associated Press contributed to this article