On Sunday, U.S. representatives unveiled two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a top-ranked member of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet.
Mayorkas is facing impeachment on two charges related to the U.S.-Mexico border chaos: dereliction of duty and lying to Congress.
All the while, the other two branches of government are scrambling to address the border crisis unfolding under Mayorkas’ watch.
Republicans said in the impeachment resolution Mayorkas is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that amount to a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” on illegal immigration and a “breach of the public trust.” Impeachment, they say, is “Congress’s only viable option.”
“Alejandro N. Mayorkas willfully and systemically refused to comply with the immigration laws, failed to control the border to the detriment of national security, compromised public safety, and violated the rule of law and separation of powers in the Constitution, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States,” the resolution says.
Only once in American history has a Cabinet secretary been impeached: William Belknap, President Ulysses Grant’s war secretary, in 1876, over kickbacks in government contracts.
The House opened an impeachment inquiry into Biden in September, but the chamber has stalled since then.
Now, Republicans have moved with rapid speed against Mayorkas after a series of hearings in recent weeks, culminating in Sunday’s announcement.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group in the U.S. Senate has been meeting with Mayorkas to negotiate a bill for border security.
Biden has vowed to “shut down the border” — but claims he needs to be given the power by the Senate’s immigration package. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has made a campaign promise to launch the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history.
The GOP-led House Homeland Security Committee is set to vote Tuesday on the articles of impeachment, aiming to send them to the full House for consideration. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has said the chamber will move forward as soon as possible with a vote after that.
Passage requires only a House majority. The Senate would hold a trial, and a two-thirds vote is required for conviction, a very unlikely outcome in the Democratic-run Senate. Even Secretary of War William Belknap was acquitted in the Senate after being unanimously impeached by the House.
Republicans say that the Biden administration has either gotten rid of policies in place under Trump that had controlled migration or enacted policies of their own that encouraged migrants from around the world to come to the U.S. illegally via the southern border.
They cite growing numbers of illegal immigrants who have overwhelmed the capacity of Customs and Border Protection authorities to supervise and process them. Arrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million in each of the U.S. government’s past two budget years. In December, arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico reached an all-time high since figures have been released. The backlog of people in immigration court has grown by 1 million over the past budget year.
Republicans have also slammed Mayorkas for lying to Congress, pointing to his comments about the border being secure or about vetting of Afghans airlifted to the U.S.
Take a look at some of the remarks that landed Mayorkas in hot water —
Re-upping this exchange following the latest Inspector General report.
Not once, but twice @SecMayorkas lied under oath to the @JudiciaryGOP about fully vetting Afghans, going as far as saying he is “proud” of the way they handled things.
He must be impeached. pic.twitter.com/45KbubrTuG
— Rep. Tom Tiffany (@RepTiffany) September 7, 2022
In the articles, Republicans argue that Mayorkas is deliberately violating immigration laws passed by Congress, such as those requiring the detention of migrants, and that through his policies, a crisis has arisen at the border. They accuse him of releasing illegal immigrants without effective ways to make sure they show up for court or are removed from the country. They cited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo written by Mayorkas that sets priorities for whom the agency should target for enforcement proceedings as proof that he is letting people stay in the country who don’t have the right to do so.
They also attacked the administration’s use of the humanitarian parole authority, which allows the DHS secretary to admit certain migrants into the country. Republicans said the Biden administration has essentially created a mass parole program that bypasses Congress. They cited cities such as New York that have struggled with high numbers of illegal immigrants, taxing housing and education systems, as proof of the financial costs immigration is taking.
The Biden administration has lambasted the impeachment proceedings, calling them a waste of time during the Senate’s negotiations on the border package.
The administration has also made excuses for Mayorkas and blamed congressional Republicans for allocating too few resources to Mayorkas’ department.
The Democrat-led administration has argued that it’s not the administration’s policies that are causing people to attempt to migrate to America but that the movement is part of a global mass migration of people fleeing wars, economic instability and political repression. They have argued that Mayorkas is doing the best he can to manage border security but with a system that hasn’t been updated in decades and is chronically underfunded.
“They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” Homeland Security said in a statement Sunday.
The department on Sunday cited high numbers of people being removed from the country, especially over roughly the last six months and its efforts to tackle fentanyl smuggling as proof that DHS is not shirking its border duties. And, they said, no administration has been able to detain every person who crosses the border illegally, citing space capacities. Instead, they focus on those who pose security threats.
“A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS Secretary since the Department was founded,” the agency said in the statement.
Congressional Democrats say that the House simply doesn’t have a constitutional basis to impeach Mayorkas.
Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House committee, said the GOP resolution did not have “a shred of evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors –- the Constitutional standard for impeachment.”
The Horn editorial team Associated Press contributed to this article.