Republican staffers on Capitol Hill are discussing a second impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a way of blocking him from holding office in the future, The Washington Times has learned.

Staffers said their conversation hasn’t reached the level of lawmakers yet, but there is an appetite for some gesture to demand accountability for what the GOP sees as an immigration catastrophe Mr. Mayorkas oversaw for nearly four years.

“Staff people are talking about it among themselves,” said one longtime Republican aide who is active on immigration issues. “People are pissed. Every time you think you’ve seen the most ridiculous possible thing his department has done, they manage to top it.”

Mr. Mayorkas has already been impeached once, becoming the first sitting Cabinet secretary in history to face that ignominy. That was in the GOP-led House.

The Democrat-controlled Senate voted to reject the case without holding a trial.

Next year, however, the Senate will be controlled by Republicans who may be more committed to holding a trial. Conviction, which requires a two-thirds vote, is still a longshot, given the partisan makeup of the chamber.

Even if Mr. Mayorkas is out of office at the time, a conviction could allow senators to vote to bar him from holding office in the future.

Emilio Gonzalez, who led U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Bush administration, said Republicans’ demands for accountability are fueling the impeachment talk.

“He oversees the border. He is the secretary of Homeland Security. He is Mr. Border Security. All of this falls under his responsibility. Nobody has been held accountable, and he is the accountable party,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

He called what’s transpired in immigration over the last few years “the largest human trafficking operation in the history of the Western Hemisphere.”

There will be a little more than two weeks between the time the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3 and the end of the Biden administration on Jan. 20.

But there’s precedent for pursuing impeachment even after an official leaves office. House Democrats did it to President-elect Donald Trump after he left office in 2021, and the House also impeached William Belknap, who’d resigned as War secretary, in 1876.

In both cases, the Senate did not vote to convict.

The Times has reached out to Mr. Mayorkas’ office for this story.

Mark Morgan, who ran Customs and Border Protection in the Trump administration, said impeachment would be too political a route for Mr. Mayorkas at this point.

He said he would prefer to see the Justice Department pursue criminal perjury charges instead for Mr. Mayorkas’ insistence that the border was “secure.”

“He was intentionally misleading the American people and hiding the magnitude of the chaos and lawlessness at the border and its impact on our country’s safety and national security,” Mr. Morgan told The Times. “He should be held accountable for those lies.”

Mr. Mayorkas has had a lengthy public career, which he often deploys in combative sessions with members of Congress, reminding them that he’s been a federal prosecutor in the Clinton era, ran USCIS and then served as deputy secretary at Homeland Security in the Obama administration and has been department secretary since Feb. 2, 2021.

He’s overseen the most chaotic border in modern U.S. history, with more than 10 million unauthorized migrants encountered — and millions of those released into American communities, often under programs he fabricated to ease their arrival.

He has justified them as attempts to cool the border. Critics say he’s breaking the law.

Mr. Mayorkas has received mixed reviews from his workforce.

Border Patrol agents and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers say their morale has been destroyed by his orders to restrict their ability to carry out their duties.

But he’s also known as “Saint Ali, the patron saint of administrative leave” to employees because of his penchant for doling out paid leave as a gift to all 260,000 department personnel.

On Friday, they celebrated his latest grant of two more days in honor of Thanksgiving, bringing this year’s total to eight days. The Times has calculated that he has given out nearly $3 billion worth of extra vacation to employees during his tenure.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.