Senate Republicans laid into Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a Tuesday hearing, demanding that he resign or be impeached over his failure to stem record levels of illegal immigration and resulting increases in migrant child labor.
Mayorkas was in agreement that both the asylum and immigration systems are broken, but sparred with several senators on the Homeland Security Committee who sought to put the blame for the deteriorating situation on him.
“You ought to resign,” explained Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). “You should have resigned long ago and if you cannot change course, you should be removed from office,” asserted Senator Josh Hawley (R., M0.).
Hawley’s colleague in the lower chamber, House Homeland Security Committee chairman Mark Green (R., Fla.) promised to donors he would produce charges of high crimes and misdemeanors against Mayorkas.
Senator Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) introduced a draft no-confidence resolution in the chamber to put the secretary on the record on his job performance.
Hawley focused his questioning on the unaccompanied children now being forced to work odd manual labor jobs. Citing the New York Times’s report from February, Hawley pointed to examples of minors being exploited throughout the country. “Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota,” the article read.
The Times followed up on its reporting Monday, explaining that the administration had missed warning signs about the increase in migrant child labor and the buck was being passed between the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Labor Department.
“Our responsibility is to turn an unaccompanied child over to Health and Human Services within 72 hours. We are not involved in the process of when HHS turns that unaccompanied child over to a sponsor,” explained Mayorkas, adding that Homeland Security’s worksite enforcement strategy is now focused on unscrupulous employers, including those who exploit children. After Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) pointed out that it sounded like the buck was being passed once again between Homeland Security and HHS, Mayorkas clarified he hadn’t intended to point the finger and asserted the responsibility is with the government and American society as a collective.
Hawley zeroed in on the child labor issue, pointing to the increase of child trafficking as well as child abuse among migrants since Mayorkas took office. The senator attributed the rise to the secretary’s policies, asking: “Are you proud of this record?”
“This massive surge began when you came to office. In your first year in office, there was a 342 percent surge of unaccompanied children across the border,” explained Hawley. “In 2021, you made the decision to change Title 42 to allow unaccompanied children to come into the United States and then to be sent into the interior of the country. Under the last administration, children were reunited with their families in their home country. You changed that and as soon as you changed it, the numbers exploded. That is your responsibility.”
“Why should you not be impeached for this?,” asked Hawley.
Mayorkas rejected Hawley’s characterization, saying it was riddled with false statements. “It is stunning to me to hear you say that the prior administration reunited children with their parents,” Mayorkas said.
Johnson probed Mayorkas on the sheer scale of the issue.
“You are failing miserably,” explained Johnson to Mayorkas. “Do you not care? Do you not have an ounce of human compassion for what your open border policy, the type of human depredation it is causing?”
“If [border security is] a priority, how did we let 4-5 million people in this country in a little over two years? The population of 20 to almost 30 states, and you’re saying this is a priority?,” Johnson asked.
Additionally, Romney had a response to the secretary’s high-level strategy to address some of the root causes of illegal immigration in this hemisphere,
“I would note note that that is an impossible task. The United States of America is always going to be a more attractive place for people to come live than in the countries that you’re describing. We have a stronger economy. People have much better lives here, much healthier lives and so forth. The idea that we’re somehow going to solve the root causes in all of Latin America of corruption of the kind of military threats going on. It’s not going to happen. So we’re going to have to secure our border,” Romney explained
“I would anticipate that if we continue to have the kind of global warming that we’ve been having there’s going to be an even greater demand to move into our country,” said Romney. “All the talk about ‘we need to address root causes’…this is taking our eye off the ball, which is we need to have our border secure.”