House Republicans revealed two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday, accusing him of breaching the public trust through dishonesty and systematically subverting the immigration laws he’s required to enforce.
The House Homeland Security Committee is scheduled to hold a vote on Tuesday, and all committee Republicans have said they will back it. Speaker Mike Johnson says he will put the measure on the full House floor soon after.
Republicans say Mr. Mayorkas has earned the ignominy of becoming the first sitting Cabinet official to be impeached by “willfully” ignoring the laws Congress has passed to discourage illegal immigration and instead substituting catch-and-release policies that have fueled a total breakdown at the border.
“These articles lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment,” said Rep. Mark Green, the Tennessee Republican who has led the impeachment proceedings. “His lawless behavior was exactly what the framers gave us the impeachment power to remedy. It is time we take this affront to a co-equal branch of government, to the Constitution and to the American people seriously.”
The impeachment effort got new fuel Friday when the Department of Homeland Security released its latest data showing that December was, by far, the worst month for illegal immigration. More than 371,000 illegal immigrants were encountered, including about 300,000 along the southern border, about 15,00 at the northern border and more than 53,000 bypassing the land borders and flying into airports or coming over the water.
“Secretary Mayorkas has outdone himself yet again,” Mr. Green said.
The first of the two articles of impeachment focuses on how Mr. Mayorkas has carried out the laws on the books, which call for detention of certain illegal immigrants and give him tools to try to dissuade new unauthorized arrivals. Instead, he’s pursued a policy of non-enforcement, the GOP says.
The second article accuses Mr. Mayorkas of obstructing Congress and making false statements about the conditions of the border and his efforts to manage it.
The Homeland Security Department, in a memo, rebutted the allegations of lying, saying the things Mr. Mayorkas is accused of on are matters of opinion.
“Secretary Mayorkas is a dedicated public servant who has spent decades, both as a federal prosecutor and at DHS, working to keep his fellow Americans safe,” the department said.
It also said Mr. Mayorkas “has upheld and enforced our laws.” The department said officers do detain illegal immigrants “to the maximum extent possible” and said that under Mr. Mayorkas, the government has set a record for most illegal immigrants ousted and has seized more fentanyl than ever.
To be sure, it has also released more of those caught illegal immigrants into the country than any previous administration, and the increase in fentanyl seizures is an indicator of just how much is getting through.
The department’s detention argument is tough to square with reality. Mr. Mayorkas shut down family detention altogether, meaning the only alternative for parents who showed up with children was catch-and-release, and for the first two years, the administration left thousands of detention center beds empty every day.
It also fought to cut detention space in favor of catch-and-release.
It was only in recent months that the administration boosted detention.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said the impeachment process has been tainted. He said the impeachment proceedings weren’t properly authorized, Mr. Mayorkas wasn’t afforded a right to challenge evidence or have his lawyers participate, and he wasn’t given a chance to testify. Democrats were also denied their chance to call a hearing, defying a customary accommodation for the minority party.
“This unserious impeachment is a testament to partisan politics over rules and reason,” said Mr. Thompson, who led Democrats’ investigation into former President Donald Trump and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Republicans said Mr. Mayorkas was invited to testify but refused to appear at the time he was invited.
They also said the House — including Mr. Thompson and fellow Democrats — did vote to authorize impeachment when they voted in November to refer Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment resolution to the Homeland Security Committee.
The biggest battle is over whether a official can be impeached for something that doesn’t rise to the level of a criminal offense. The Constitution speaks of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but many legal experts say that does not require an actual crime.
Republicans point to James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, who as a member of the first Congress seemed to suggest that impeachment was a political tool available to lawmakers to deal with “abuse in the executive power.”
“If an unworthy man be continued in office by an unworthy president, the House of Representatives can at any time impeach him, and the Senate can remove him, whether the president [chooses] or not,” Madison said during a debate over creating a department for foreign affairs in 1789.
Besides that, Republicans say the Supreme Court has already given a tacit green light to impeachment. They pointed to a ruling in a case last year in which Texas had challenged Mr. Mayorkas’ 2021 memo releasing new priorities for enforcement in which the secretary said even if the law called for deportation, agents and officers should be reluctant unless there were serious aggravating circumstances.
Lower courts ruled against Mr. Mayorkas, but the justices, in an 8-1 ruling, decided that Texas lacked standing to sue.
Dissenting, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that left opponents of Mr. Mayorkas, including Congress, with few options other than impeachment.
And during oral arguments, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh echoed that sentiment.
“I think your position is, instead of judicial review, Congress has to resort to shutting down the government or impeachment or dramatic steps if some administration comes in and says, ‘We’re not going to enforce laws or at least not going to enforce the laws to the degree that Congress by law has said the laws should be enforced,’” Justice Kavanaugh told the Justice Department lawyer. “I understand your position, but it’s forcing Congress to take dramatic steps, I think.”
In the end, Justice Kavanaugh sided with Mr. Mayorkas and wrote the decision tossing out Texas’s lawsuit for lack of legal standing.
Justice Alito, in his opinion in last year’s case, said without access to the courts, there are few avenues to rein in a runaway executive. For Congress, they include withholding funds, refusing to confirm presidential nominees, and impeachment and removal.
The House plays no role in confirmations, however, and Republicans say withholding funds isn’t an answer when Mr. Mayorkas says his current lack of enforcement is because he doesn’t have enough money already.
That leaves impeachment, said Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican.
“This is the legal justification for these proceedings,” Mr. McCaul said during impeachment hearings this month. “The founders believed impeachable offenses included corrupt administration, neglect of duty and official misconduct.”
Impeachment requires only a majority vote in the House. Removal takes a trial and two-thirds vote for conviction in the Senate. That is unthinkable, given Democrats’ majority in the upper chamber.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.