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Republican holdout Gallagher, who had served as a Marine, announced over the weekend he would not be seeking reelection in the fall, joining a growing list of serious-minded Republican lawmakers heading for the exits. Johnson and the Republicans have pushed back, arguing that the Biden administration could take executive actions, as Trump did, to stop the number of crossings — though the courts have questioned and turned back some of those efforts. Several leading conservative scholars along with former Homeland Security secretaries from both Republican and Democratic administrations have dismissed the Mayorkas impeachment as unwarranted or a waste of time. Border security has shot to the top of campaign issues, with Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, insisting he will launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if he retakes the White House. Democrats say Republicans are trying to impeach Mayorkas over policy disputes, which legal experts have said are not grounds for impeachment. The first impeachment article goes on to accuse Mayorkas of having circumvented the law by paroling migrants into the U.S. "en masse in order to release them from mandatory detention."
Department of Homeland Security and White House praises end Mayorkas impeachment
So far, a handful of Republicans have expressed reservations, but some who initially voted to shelve the issue have indicated they are more willing to proceed. But the Department of Homeland Security said Mayorkas told the committee he was unavailable Thursday but would be willing to appear on other dates. The department noted he has appeared before Congress more than any other Biden administration Cabinet member — including 27 times in 35 months.
GOP-led House impeaches Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas — by one vote — over border management
In December, arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico reached an all-time high since figures have been released. The backlog of people in immigration court has grown by 1 million over the past budget year. 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.
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The secretary and Democrats argue that it’s up to Congress to pass border security legislation. Although most Republicans remain upset with how the Mayorkas impeachment trial process went down, they don’t have a desire to have a third presidential impeachment trial come down the rails in a matter of just six years. They are also content to let things play out at the ballot box in a little more than six months. Republican impeachment efforts against President Biden and his Cabinet appear to have hit a brick wall after the Senate swiftly dismissed articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
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House Republicans release articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas
But Republicans pushed ahead, arguing that Mayorkas’s handling of the southern border warranted a historic rebuke. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., filed articles of impeachment against him in August 2021 but the measure went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Congress. Americans broadly disapprove of the president’s handling of the border, now a top concern for many voters. Ahead of the 2024 election, Republicans have assailed Biden over the border while Donald Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, has again put immigration at the center of his campaign. Still, constitutional scholars argue that the allegations against Mayorkas do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses.
"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." He accused Mr. Mayorkas and President Biden of intentionally failing in their responsibilities to secure the border. “A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS Secretary since the Department was founded,” the agency said in the statement.
The guidelines are an exercise of discretionary authority that has been employed by multiple administrations to prioritize the deportations of migrants with the most serious criminal records. Part of the difficulty of complying with detention mandates is that backlogs in the system quickly overload available resources. That was in 2019, when the Trump administration was criticized for detaining them in overcrowded, unsanitary and dangerous conditions. A bipartisan deal in the Senate, which Mr. Mayorkas helped broker, seeks to reduce that timeline to no longer than six months. "Here, in light of the inability of injured parties to seek judicial relief to remedy the refusal of Alejandro N. Mayorkas to comply with Federal immigration laws, impeachment is Congress's only viable option," the first article said.
Editorial: Two misconceptions and a truth about the U.S.-Mexico border
Under the Constitution, the basis for impeachment is "high Crimes and Misdemeanors." And although enough House Republicans supported the impeachment effort in the lower chamber, the effort is all but certain to die in the Senate. The second impeachment article accuses Mayorkas of "knowingly making false statements to Congress and the American people and avoiding lawful oversight in order to obscure the devastating consequences of his willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law and carry out his statutory duties." But even after the GOP push to delay the articles' transmission, the duration of the trial in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where the effort is widely seen as a political stunt, has not been determined.
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The Biden administration ended the practice in 2021, one of many moves Republicans cite as having contributed to a surge of migration that followed. Republicans say this charge stems from a five-part investigation they conducted into Mr. Mayorkas's border policies before they started impeachment proceedings. The Department of Homeland Security maintains that they have provided tens of thousands of pages of documents to the panel, in compliance with the requests. The focus on the guidelines Mr. Mayorkas issued in 2021 — particularly as it applies to migrants with a criminal record — has been a major rallying cry for Republicans as they charge Mr. Mayorkas with willfully undermining laws and endangering the United States.
House Speaker Mike Johnson defended his approach to the supplemental foreign aid funding in an interview with CNN on Wednesday after the bill text showed a strong similarity to the bipartisan Senate measure. This goes to the heart of the discretionary authority that successive administrations have employed to prioritize which migrants should be first in line for removal. Mr. Mayorkas's 2021 guidelines laid out a strategy similar to those of previous administrations, which prioritized using limited resources to deport the most dangerous migrants before those with lesser or older offenses on their records. The delay in deporting people often comes down to resources, including not only a lack of available detention space, but also putting migrants on flights to their home countries.
But the statute gives the president and the homeland security secretary broad discretion to prioritize who is detained and explicit power to grant parole, which allows migrants to live and work temporarily in the country. The Biden administration and many others have used these authorities, especially when there is a shortage of detention space and backlogs in the immigration courts that make detaining all — or even most — unauthorized entrants impossible. The Republican-led House is poised to vote on Tuesday on whether to charge Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, with two counts of high crimes and misdemeanors, which would make him the first sitting cabinet member in United States history to be impeached. Legal experts have questioned the grounds for taking the action, arguing that the accusations against him do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. But Republicans are pushing forward anyway in what is essentially a bid to indict Mr. Mayorkas for President Biden’s immigration policies, which they argue have fueled a wave of illegal migration. Constitutional scholars have called the case against Mr. Mayorkas groundless, and the Democrats who control the Senate have made it clear that they want to curtail a lengthy trial in favor of a quick vote to dismiss the charges against him.
Democrats control the Senate, 51-49, and they appear to be united against the impeachment effort. The House Judiciary Committee, which would have jurisdiction over an impeachment resolution, is prepared to move ahead with formal proceedings if there appears to be a consensus within the GOP conference, according to a GOP source directly familiar with the matter. The first impeachment resolution introduced by House Republicans already has picked up support, including from a member of the GOP leadership team.
The Senate is allowed to call witnesses, as well, if it so decides, and can ask questions of both sides after the opening arguments are finished. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who is facing a tough reelection bid in Ohio, called the impeachment trial a "distraction," arguing that Republicans should instead support a bipartisan border compromise they scuttled earlier this year. In any case, Republicans would not be able to win the support of the two-thirds of the Senate that is needed to convict and remove Mayorkas from office.
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