House Republicans released two impeachment charges against Alejandro Mayorkas Sunday, accusing the Department of Homeland Security Secretary of high crimes and misdemeanors for his implementation of US immigration policy.
The first article charges Mayorkas with “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” by implementing a so-called “catch and release” policy, which allows many migrants awaiting court proceedings to remain in the United States without being detained.
The second article accuses him of having “knowingly made false statements, and knowingly obstructed lawful oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.”
“These articles lay out a clear, compelling and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s impeachment,” Tennessee Representative Mark Green, who chaired the House Homeland Security panel that released the impeachment articles, said in a statement. “Congress has a duty to see that the executive branch implements and enforces the laws we have passed.”
The DHS immediately hit back against the impeachment articles Sunday, accusing Republicans of having “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 memo argued that Republicans “don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it.”
Mississippi Representative Bennie Johnson, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, called on the House to “reject this sham resolution” in a statement. Describing the committee’s investigation a “remarkably fact-free affair,” Johnson accused Republicans of “abusing Congress’s impeachment power to appease their MAGA members, score political points and deflect Americans’ attention from their do-nothing Congress.”
The committee will officially take up the charges on Tuesday, and if approved, a House impeachment vote could come as soon as early February. In a Friday letter to his House colleagues, Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to hold an impeachment vote “as soon as possible.”
While there’s practically no chance the charges will ultimately make it past the Democratic-led Senate, where a two-thirds majority is necessary to convict, the impeachment proceedings are sure to create a spectacle of the immigration issue in this election year.
The effort to impeach Mayorkas comes as President Joe Biden is working to cement a bipartisan border bill in the Senate, which Mayorkas has helped organize.
On Friday, Biden, whose campaign has warned of the return of “extreme, racist, cruel” immigration policies in a second Trump term, significantly escalated his rhetoric on the issue. In a statement, he promised to “shut down” the border and argued that, if passed, the bipartisan bill would “be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country.”
Standing in the way of the bill’s passage through Congress is a group of House Republicans, who, with the backing of former President Donald Trump, are staunchly opposed to any bipartisan deal. In his Friday letter, Johnson said that any Senate deal would be “dead on arrival” in the House.
The GOP frontrunner, who is hoping to make immigration a key issue of his re-election bid, has campaigned vociferously against the deal, to the consternation of some Senate Republicans. “I’ll fight it all the way,” Trump said of the deal during a Saturday evening rally in Nevada. “A lot of the Senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s okay. Please blame it on me. Please.”
