WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Sunday released two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, vowing to move quickly on efforts to oust the Cabinet member over what they called his failure to clear the U.S.-Mexico border to manage. Democrats and the agency blasted the move as a politically motivated stunt that lacked the constitutional basis to remove him from office.
Republicans allege Mayorkas is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that amount to a “deliberate and systematic refusal to comply with immigration law” and a “breach of the public trust.” Impeachment, they say, is “Congress’s only viable option.”
“Alejandro N. Mayorkas willfully and systematically refused to enforce immigration laws, failed to control the border at the expense of national security, endangered public safety, and violated the rule of law and the separation of powers in the Constitution, including the manifest harm caused to the people of the United States,” the impeachment resolution said.
Since taking control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Republicans have pushed for Mayorkas’ impeachment. Sunday’s announcement comes as their other impeachment trial — to oust Democratic President Joe Biden over his son Hunter’s business dealings — has struggled to make progress.
But Republicans have moved quickly 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 with Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, promising to launch the “largest deportation operation” in American history if he returns to the White House .
The Republican push also comes at a curious time for Mayorkas.
As the House of Representatives moves to remove him from office, Mayorkas is engaged in difficult negotiations with senators trying to reach an agreement on border policy. He has received praise from senators for his involvement in the trial.
The Republican-controlled House Homeland Security Committee will vote on the articles of impeachment on Tuesday, with the aim of sending 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 afterward.
Passage only requires a majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate would hold a trial, and a conviction would require a two-thirds majority, an extremely unlikely outcome in the Democratic-led Senate.
Democrats say Republicans have conducted a sham impeachment trial against Mayorkas and that they do not have 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 resources it needs to control the situation.
“They don’t want to solve the problem; they want to campaign for it. That is 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 on Sunday .
The two articles are the culmination of a roughly year-long investigation by Republicans into the secretary of state’s handling of the border and what they describe as a crisis of the administration’s own making. Republicans argue that the administration and Mayorkas specifically abolished policies under Trump that had controlled migration, or instituted their own policies that encouraged migrants from around the world to enter the U.S. illegally through the southern border.
They cite a growing number of migrants who have at times overwhelmed the capacity of Customs and Border Protection authorities to care and process them. Arrests for illegal crossings exceeded 2 million in each of the last two U.S. government budget years. On some days in December last year, the number of illegal crossings exceeded 10,000. The immigration court backlog increased by $1 million in the last fiscal year.
In the articles, Republicans argue that Mayorkas is deliberately violating immigration laws passed by Congress, such as those requiring the detention of migrants, and that his policies have created a crisis at the border. They accuse him of releasing migrants without effective ways to ensure they appear in court or are removed from the country. They cited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo written by Mayorkas that prioritizes who the agency should target in enforcement proceedings as evidence that he is allowing people to stay in the country who have no right to do so.
They also attacked the administration’s use of humanitarian parole, which allows the DHS secretary to admit certain migrants into the country. Republicans said the Biden administration has essentially created a massive parole program that bypasses Congress. They cited cities like New York, which are struggling with large numbers of migrants, burdening housing and education systems, as evidence of the financial costs of immigration.
Democrats say Republicans simply disagree with the administration’s policies and that policy differences are not grounds for impeachment. They have criticized the procedure, calling it a waste of time when lawmakers should be working together to solve the problems.
Both Democrats and Mayorkas have argued that it is not the administration’s policies that are causing people to try to migrate to America, but that the movement is part of a global mass migration of people fleeing wars, economic instability and political repression. They have argued that Mayorkas is doing his best to manage border security, but with a system that has not been updated in decades and is chronically underfunded.
The department on Sunday cited the large numbers of people removed from the country, especially in the past six months, and efforts to crack down on fentanyl smuggling as evidence that DHS is not shirking its border duties. And, they said, no government has been able to detain every person crossing the border illegally, citing space capacity. Instead, they target those who pose a threat to security.
“A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress would have had to remove every DHS secretary since the department’s creation,” the agency said in the statement.
The last Cabinet secretary to be removed was William Belknap, the war secretary under President Ulysses Grant, over corruption issues.
The House voted unanimously on March 2, 1876 to impeach Belknap on five articles of impeachment in which he had criminally ignored his Cabinet duties and used his office for personal gain. Belknap had resigned earlier that same day. After a trial in the Senate, a majority of senators voted to convict him, but they did not have enough votes to reach the necessary two-thirds majority and Belknap was acquitted.