House Republicans advanced a vote to impeach Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday, on grounds that he betrayed the public trust by refusing to enforce U.S. immigration law.
The House voted 216-210 on Tuesday to debate the measure, setting up a final House vote that’s expected to take place Tuesday evening.
Two Republicans, Representatives Ken Buck (R., Colo.) and Tom McClintock (R., Calif.), have said that they will vote against the measure. With just a three-vote majority in the House, Republicans could lose the vote if more members break with GOP leadership.
“The results of his lawless behavior have been disastrous for our country,” House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R., Tenn.) said. “Empowered and enriched cartels, mass fentanyl poisonings, surges of terror watchlist suspects, more criminal illegal aliens causing harm in our communities, and traumatized and exploited migrants will be Secretary Mayorkas’ open-borders legacy.”
The vote comes amid debate over a controversial border legislation introduced on Sunday that would effectively cap the number of migrants allowed into the country — if there is an average of 5,000 crossings over one week or if 8,500 illegal aliens cross into the country on one day. The trigger number only incentivizes illegal immigration, Republicans said of the deal, and would still permit an unacceptable number of illegal immigrant crossings.
Republicans also said this weekend that the deal is “riddled with loopholes that grant far too much discretionary authority to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has proven he will exploit every measure possible, in defiance of the law, to keep the border open.”
Under Mayorkas’s leadership, the Biden administration has allowed a record number of illegal immigrants into the country. Border Patrol agents encountered more than 300,000 immigrants at the Southern border in December, the agency reported, up nearly 50,000 since last December. Agents encountered a record-breaking 2.4 million migrants in total last year.
Despite the influx, Mayorkas has not stopped illegal immigrant crossings and in some Southern border states like Texas, has thwarted the state’s plans to curb illegal immigration. Federal officials removed the razor wire Texas set up at the border to dissuade illegal crossings and have sued the state for trying to arrest illegal immigrants.
“Texas cannot run its own immigration system. Its efforts, through SB 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations,” the Department of Justice said in the lawsuit challenging Texas’s border-security measures.
Mayorkas also repealed many Trump-era policies including the Migrant Protection Protocols, which required immigrants at the southern border to go back to Mexico and stay there until their court date. Mayorkas has called the impeachment inquiry a political stunt and refuses to refer to what he calls a broken system as a “crisis.”
“I think [the inquiry] is baseless,” Mayorkas told the New York Times. “I think it’s a political process, and I am not engaged in politics. I’m engaged in the work of the Department of Homeland Security.”
Border security and protecting Americans “from the illicit movement of weapons, drugs, contraband, and people, while promoting lawful entry and exit, and lawful trade,” the Department of Homeland Security says, “is essential to homeland security, economic prosperity, and national sovereignty.”
DHS lawyers called the impeachment “illegitimate, invalid, and dangerous,” and added that the inquiry is “nothing more than a simple list of criticisms of the policies of the current Administration.”
“That Article claims that the Secretary made false statements about ‘operational control’ or border security, that he inappropriately reversed Trump-era immigration policies, and that he failed to comply with unidentified Congressional subpoenas. These conclusory assertions are false, and the Resolution provides no support for them,” DHS lawyers said in a letter.
Republicans, however, claim that Mayorkas breached public trust by failing to detain migrants who enter the country illegally.