By Canadian Press

House Republicans unveil articles of impeachment in bid to oust Homeland Security chief over border

Jan 28, 2024 | 7:16 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans on Sunday released two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as they vowed to swiftly push forward with efforts to oust the Cabinet member over what they call his failure to manage the U.S.-Mexico border. Democrats and the agency slammed the move as a politically motivated stunt lacking the constitutional basis to remove him from office.

Republicans contend Mayorkas is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that amount to a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” on immigration and a “breach of the public trust.” Impeachment, they say, 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. history if he returns to the White House.

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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 growing numbers of migrants who have at times overwhelmed the capacity of Customs and Border Protection authorities to care and process them. Arrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million in each of the U.S. government’s past two budget years. Some days last December, illegal crossings topped 10,000. The backlog of people in immigration court has grown by 1 million over the past budget year.

In the articles, Republicans argue that Mayorkas is deliberately violating immigration laws passed by Congress, such as those requiring detention of migrants, and that through his policies, a crisis has arisen at the border. They accuse him of releasing migrants without effective ways to make sure they show up for court or are removed from the country. They cited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo written by Mayorkas that sets priorities for whom the agency should target for enforcement proceedings as proof that he is letting people stay in the country who don’t have the right to do so.

Rebecca Santana, The Associated Press