House Republicans successfully impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a monumental vote on Tuesday, a week after their first impeachment effort had failed.
The resolution passed 214 to 213, making Mayorkas the first cabinet official to be impeached in nearly 150 years. Representatives Tom McClintock (R., Calif.), Ken Buck (R., Colo.), and Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) opposed the latest impeachment effort alongside Democrats, just as they had done last week.
Mayorkas, who has presided over record levels of illegal immigration since taking office in 2021, narrowly avoided the first impeachment attempt last Tuesday after McClintock, Buck, and Gallagher joined the united Democratic caucus in voting against the resolution. Representative Blake Moore (R., Utah) changed his vote to “nay” at the last minute in order to raise the measure again in the future.
The final vote that night was 216 against to 214 in favor of the resolution.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.), who was absent last week because of cancer treatment, returned to the House on Monday to join his GOP colleagues in impeaching the DHS secretary.
Late last month, House Republicans introduced two articles of impeachment accusing Mayorkas of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and a “breach of public trust.”
The first article of impeachment alleges that Mayorkas knowingly released illegal immigrants into the U.S., rather than detaining them, under the Biden administration’s catch-and-release policy. As for the second article, Mayorkas is charged with lying to lawmakers about whether the southern border was secure during his numerous testimonies on Capitol Hill and obstructing congressional oversight of the DHS.
For months, the Biden administration has been pushing Congress to approve legislation in order to fix the immigration system and allocate more resources to the southern border amid a historic rise in immigration levels.
That plan, however, was scrapped after the Senate struck down the negotiated border deal that tied border-security provisions to foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific region. Because Senate Republicans and Democrats couldn’t pass the border deal, the Senate passed a legislative package worth $95 billion in foreign aid earlier on Tuesday. The package’s fate remains uncertain in the House, considering it lacks the agreed-upon border measures.