WASHINGTON – House Republicans on Sunday launched two articles of impeachment towards Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as they vowed to hastily push ahead with efforts to oust the Cabinet member over what they call his failure to manage the U.S.-Mexico border. Democrats and the company slammed the transfer as a politically motivated stunt missing the constitutional foundation to take away him from place of work.
Republicans contend Mayorkas is to blame of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that quantity to a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” on immigration and a “breach of the public trust.” Impeachment, they are saying, is “Congress’s only viable option.”
“Alejandro N. Mayorkas willfully and systemically refused to comply with the immigration laws, failed to control the border to the detriment of national security, compromised public safety, and violated the rule of law and separation of powers in the Constitution, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States,” the impeachment resolution says.
Ever since taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans have pushed to impeach Mayorkas. Sunday’s announcement comes as their other impeachment drive — to impeach Democratic President Joe Biden in relation to his son Hunter’s business dealings — has struggled to advance.
But Republicans have moved with rapid speed against Mayorkas after a series of hearings in recent weeks. It all comes at a time when border security and immigration are key issues in the 2024 campaign and as Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is promising to launch the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. historical past if he returns to the White House.
The GOP push also comes at a curious time for Mayorkas.
Even as the House is taking steps to try remove him from office, Mayorkas has been engaged in arduous negotiations with senators seeking to reach a bipartisan deal on border policy. He has won praise from senators for his engagement in the process.
The Republican-controlled House Homeland Security Committee is set to vote Tuesday on the articles of impeachment, aiming to send them to the full House for consideration. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has said the House will move forward as soon as possible with a vote after that.
Passage requires only a House majority. The Senate would hold a trial, and a two-thirds vote is required for conviction, an exceedingly unlikely outcome in the Democratic-run Senate.
Democrats say Republicans have held a sham of an impeachment process against Mayorkas and lack the constitutional grounds to impeach the secretary. They also say Republicans are part of the problems at the border, with Republicans attacking Mayorkas even as they have failed to give his department the tools it needs to manage the situation.
“They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” the department said in a statement Sunday.
The two articles mark the culmination of a roughly yearlong examination by Republicans of the secretary’s handling of the border and what they describe as a crisis of the administration’s own making. Republicans contend that the administration and Mayorkas specifically either got rid of policies in place under Trump that had controlled migration or enacted policies of their own that encouraged migrants from around the world to come to the U.S. illegally via the southern border.
They cite rising numbers of migrants who’ve every now and then beaten the capability of Customs and Border Protection government to care and procedure them. Arrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million in every of the U.S. executive’s previous two price range years. Some days closing December, unlawful crossings crowned 10,000. The backlog of people in immigration court has grown by means of 1 million over the previous price range yr.
In the articles, Republicans argue that Mayorkas is intentionally violating immigration regulations handed by means of Congress, reminiscent of the ones requiring detention of migrants, and that via his insurance policies, a disaster has arisen on the border. They accuse him of freeing migrants with out efficient tactics to ensure they display up for courtroom or are got rid of from the rustic. They cited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo written by means of Mayorkas that units priorities for whom the company must goal for enforcement court cases as evidence that he’s letting other people keep in the rustic who do not have the appropriate to achieve this.
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