Two mothers appeared Thursday before the House panel conducting an impeachment inquiry into Alejandro Mayorkas, eviscerating the homeland security secretary for his failure to secure the US border and sharing personal tragedies brought about by a surge in crime and fentanyl trafficking.
“On July 27, 2022, I received the worst news that a parent doesn’t want to hear,” Maryland mom Tammy Nobles told the House Homeland Security Committee, “that my newly 20-year-old daughter, Kayla Hamilton, was murdered in her own room and left on the floor like trash.”
“The illegal MS-13 known gang member brutally raped and murdered my daughter by strangling her with a cord and robbed her of six dollars,” added Nobles, who appeared with another grieving parent, Josephine Dunn, and a law professor — while Mayorkas declined to show, citing an event he was hosting with Mexican officials.
Republican panelist have argued that Mayorkas, 64, is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors by not enforcing federal immigration laws and misleading Congress about the Biden administration’s border control.
Nobles and Dunn told committee members that Biden administration policies were directly responsible for the deaths of their daughters.
Nobles said she blamed “operational neglect” by DHS in screening migrants, say that the agency’s employees did not check for gang tattoos when processing the 17-year-old El Salvador native who went on to murder her daughter — nor did the agency attempt to verify with officials in the Central American country whether he was a known MS-13 member.
DHS employees also did not follow protocols that require unaccompanied minors entering the country to be sent to a verified relative, she also noted, saying the failures allowed the migrant to “rent a room in a trailer park from another individual who was also an illegal immigrant.”
“If we had stricter border policies, my daughter would still be alive today,” Nobles concluded.
Josephine Dunn testified on what would have been her late daughter Ashley’s birthday after she died of a fentanyl overdose on May 26, 2021.
“I wish to spare as many parents the unfathomable pain and debilitating grief that I carry every single day,” Dunn told panel members. “In that same five minutes that I get to share her story — after I traveled all the way from Arizona for Mr. Mayorkas not to appear here today — someone else’s loved one in the United States will die.”
“Every time I close my eyes, I see all of the tubes. When it’s quiet, I hear all the machines that were keeping her alive,” she said, her voice breaking.
“In my humble opinion, Mr. Mayorkas’ border policy is partially responsible for my daughter’s death. His wide open border policy allows massive quantities of poisonous fentanyl into our country. Arizona is the fentanyl superhighway into the United States.”
“The weapon of mass destruction has caused on imaginable numbers of deaths, unmeasurable damage to our country’s families, including my own,” she ended. “My family is broken. My heart is broken. And he couldn’t even be here to face me today.”
Asked by committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) whether they believed Mayorkas had “done an adequate job of vetting illegal aliens” and “cares about the well-being and safety of US citizens,” both mothers said no.
“Absolutely not,” Dunn replied firmly.
On Wednesday, the chairman and a Homeland Security rep had traded accusations over the reason for Mayorkas’ absence, with a spokeswoman saying: “the Committee failed to respond to DHS to find a mutually agreeable date.”
Green said at the start of the hearing that he had asked the secretary many times to come and been rebuffed, while Mayorkas made other comments to the press indicating his willingness to appear.
“That’s stonewalling,” added Green, who had requested written testimony that Mayorkas has 10 days to file with the committee.
A DHS spokeswoman said the panel had also “provided this offer of written testimony to the media before any outreach to the Department” and were “playing politics rather than work[ing] together to address the serious issues at the border.”
Committee Democrats dismissed the hearing — as they had the previous one with three state attorneys general — as a “sham” impeachment proceeding, with Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) calling it “pre-determined.”
“You cannot impeach a Cabinet secretary because you don’t like a president’s policies. That’s not what impeachment is for,” Thompson said in his opening remarks. “That’s not what the Constitution says. Unfortunately, Republicans are willing to damage the Constitution.”
Deborah Pearlstein, the minority witness and a law professor at Princeton University, echoed the charge, calling impeachment “a narrow remedy.”
“The last significant piece of comprehensive immigration legislation to pass Congress with bipartisan support was in 1986,” she said. “The action under consideration here — impeachment — isn’t a tool of policy change, particularly the impeachment of a single Cabinet official who can be replaced by another official given precisely the same role, will have no effect on the heartbreaking problems we have heard described.”
The last Cabinet official to be impeached served under President Ulysses S. Grant and resigned from his post hours before the House held its vote to do so in 1876. The Senate acquitted the official, Secretary of War William Belknap, months later.
But Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), another panel member, disagreed.
“I believe he’s violated his oath. He’s violated the public trust. He’s violated your daughters,” he told the witnesses. “I intend to personally uphold my oath to my country that I took in office. It’s been a dereliction of duty of the grossest proportions I’ve seen in my 25 years of dealing with this border.”