Washington — As border security becomes a top 2024 election issue, House Republicans pushed late Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his “willful and systematic” failure to implement immigration laws.
As Republicans embrace GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump's hard-line deportation policy to immigration, the Homeland Security Committee debated two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas all day, an unusual allegation against a Cabinet member in over 150 years. Secretary Mayorkas' actions and judgments have forced us to move with articles of impeachment, said Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn.
Amid a historic influx of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Mayorkas “refused to comply with Federal immigration laws” and “breached the public trust” in his assurances to Congress that the border is safe, according to the papers.
The House might vote on the articles next week following a committee vote later in the night after legislators work through changes. In a rare personal appeal, Mayorkas wrote to the committee that it should work with the Biden administration to modernize the nation's “broken and outdated” immigration rules at a time of record global migration.
“We need a legislative solution and only Congress can provide it,” Mayorkas wrote to the panel chairman forcefully. Democrats on the panel branded the proceedings a spectacle and a charade that may chill future public workers caught in policy disagreements by lawmakers who disagree with the president's approach. Cabinet members seldom face impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.
This is a terrible day for the committee, the United States, the Constitution, and our great country,” said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee's leading Democrat. Thompson said the “MAGA-led impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas is a baseless sham.” referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. Capitol Hill is unusually split as the Senate works with the secretary on a bipartisan border security legislation on life support and the House investigates Mayorkas.
The senators' deal with Mayorkas may be the most significant bipartisan immigration plan in a decade. It might fail politically if Republicans and some Democrats abandon it. On the campaign road and in private, Trump has pushed to kill the accord. “I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill,” Trump remarked in Las Vegas over the weekend.
According to his campaign speech in South Carolina, President Joe Biden will “shut down the border right now” to prevent migration if Congress gives him an emergency law. “I’ve done all I can do,” Biden told reporters Tuesday before leaving for a campaign trip to Florida. “Give me the power” through legislation, he added, “from the very day I got in office.
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