U.S. House Republicans held their first impeachment hearing Wednesday against U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his handling of what they called the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In a 20-minute opening statement, Mark Green, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, shared what he said was evidence that supports impeaching a Cabinet secretary.
"Secretary Mayorkas has brazenly refused to enforce the laws passed by Congress that knowingly made our country less safe," he said.
Republicans blame Mayorkas for the high numbers of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and said the Republican Party has undertaken a yearlong investigation into the secretary’s work.
During the hearing, Green said Mayorkas' failure to adhere to the law provides ample justification for initiating impeachment proceedings. The lawmaker said the framers of the constitution did not envision impeachment solely for criminal acts but also for individuals displaying significant incompetence, jeopardizing fellow Americans, breaching public trust, or neglecting their duties.
"What we are seeing here is a willful violation of his oath of office by Secretary Mayorkas," Green said.
Democrats dismissed the impeachment efforts.
Representative Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the committee, said Republicans want to "throw political red meat to their base," adding that Republicans have "absolutely no basis" to impeach Mayorkas.
"You cannot impeach a Cabinet secretary because you don’t like a president’s policies — that’s not what impeachment is for," he said.
US-Mexico border
Meanwhile, Mayorkas has carried on with his duties. On Monday, he visited the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, to see Southwest border enforcement efforts.
His visit came after federal border officials reported a record 11,000 apprehensions a day at the southern border in December alone. These encounters dropped sharply with the beginning of the new year.
"It coincided with the time when Mexican enforcement was no longer implemented. The immigration enforcement agency in Mexico was not funded, which prompted President [Joe] Biden to reconnect with [Mexican] President [Andres Manual Lopez] Obrador …" Mayorkas told reporters.
The high numbers of migrants encountered at the southern border is one of the Republicans’ arguments to impeach the DHS secretary.
In year 2023, about 2.5 million migrants were encountered by border patrol officers. Out of those, 564,380 were expelled under Title 42, a public health code that expired on May 11, 2023. It was used during the pandemic and allowed U.S. immigration officials to quickly expel migrants to their country of origin or Mexican border towns and denied them a chance at asylum.
But it did not ban them from trying again, and migrants were counted multiple times under Title 42.
According to DHS, the department repatriated about 469,000 migrants in fiscal 2023, while about 909,450 more were processed by border patrol officials and received a document to present themselves at an Immigration Customs Enforcement office. Some of those were paroled into the U.S. and allowed to stay temporarily or paroled into the alternative to detention program. And 311,343 more migrants were transferred to an ICE detention facility.
Since the end of Title 42, everyone is again processed under Title 8, the federal code of laws dealing with immigration. Those arriving at the border without documents or trying to enter between ports of entry can be removed without their case being decided by an immigration court through a process known as expedited removal, and they are banned from entering the U.S. for at least five years.
While in Texas, Mayorkas said that migrants encountered at the border who do not have a legal basis to stay in the U.S. will be removed.
Next steps
Impeaching the Homeland Security secretary would be a rare occurrence. In U.S. history, only one Cabinet official, Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876, has been impeached.
The committee is expected to host more hearings as part of the impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas. Once concluded, the panel is expected to conduct a markup on articles of impeachment that will culminate in a committee vote, setting the stage for the articles to be subsequently forwarded to the full House for consideration.
Mayorkas, however, is not expected to be removed by the Senate.
