WASHINGTON (CN) — As House Republicans get ready to advance a measure to fire Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Democrats on Monday accused their colleagues of attempting a political hack job.
The House Committee on Homeland Security is scheduled Tuesday to vote on articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, unveiled over the weekend. Republicans argued in the 20-page document that the Homeland Security secretary “has repeatedly violated laws enacted by Congress regarding immigration and border security.”
Impeaching Mayorkas has long been a goal of some of the GOP’s more conservative members, who see border security as a top issue heading into the 2024 presidential election. Democrats, however, have defended the secretary’s record, and during a press conference Monday framed the effort to impeach him as a political ploy.
“House Republicans have clearly turned their ever-shrinking majority over to the extremists,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The New York Democrat called the impeachment proceedings “a political stunt and a hit job” masterminded by former President Donald Trump and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has long advocated for Mayorkas’s removal.
Democrats argued that their Republican colleagues have yet to produce evidence that the Homeland Security secretary violated the Constitution — the threshold for impeachment.
Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson, the Homeland Security Committee’s ranking member, concurred, saying Democrats do not think Mayorkas’s conduct meets the standard of high crimes and misdemeanors necessary to pursue impeachment.
Thompson said he was concerned that Republicans are using impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas to “confuse the public that something is going wrong at the Department of Homeland Security. He noted Mayorkas acts at the direction of President Biden and is responsible for carrying out the White House’s immigration policy.
“So, this notion that carrying out the directions of your boss is somehow an impeachable offense is wrong,” he said.
The House Democrats resolved to work in a bipartisan fashion with Republicans on immigration legislation, dismissing the forthcoming impeachment vote as part of a broader effort to win back the White House in November.
“We are ready, willing and able to work in a bipartisan way to address the challenges that exist at the border,” said Jeffries. “But, the extreme MAGA Republicans have been directed by Donald Trump not to work together to address the challenges at the border and instead to distract the American people — and that’s why they’re wasting time.”
Among the charges levied by Republicans against Mayorkas, lawmakers say he ran afoul of migrant detention guidelines laid out in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which require that certain people applying for admission into the U.S. are detained before appearing at an immigration court.
Under Mayorkas’s leadership, the GOP contends in its impeachment articles, immigrants have been released “without effective mechanisms to ensure appearances before the immigration courts for removal proceedings or to ensure removal.”
Lawmakers also accuse Mayorkas of allowing immigrants to be paroled for such releases en masse rather than on a case-by-case basis.
The Homeland Security secretary’s “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” Republicans said, has led to skyrocketing levels of illegal immigration, creating a “fiscal and humanitarian crisis” in communities along the country’s Southwest border.
The impeachment articles also cite increased cross-border trafficking of illegal drugs such as fentanyl, and Border Patrol encounters with immigrants on the government terrorist watch list as further examples of Mayorkas’ misadministration.
The Homeland Security Department, meanwhile, has branded Republicans’ impeachment effort a “farce,” writing in a memo over the weekend that the gambit is “a distraction from other vital national security priorities and the work Congress should be doing to actually fix our broken immigration laws.”
The agency argued GOP lawmakers have been set on impeaching Mayorkas from the jump and that their investigation into the secretary was “hyper-partisan” and “completely neglected due process and fairness.”
The Homeland Security Department also contended that Mayorkas is fulfilling the duties Republicans have accused him of shirking. The Biden administration has “removed, returned or expelled more migrants in three years than the prior administration did in four years,” the agency wrote.
Similarly, federal officials have seized more fentanyl and arrested more people for related crimes in the last two years than any time in the last five years combined, they said.
The department also pushed back on the GOP’s contention that Mayorkas has violated federal immigration law, pointing out that it adheres to mandatory detention requirements “to the maximum extent possible.”
“No administration has ever been able to detain every individual who crosses illegally,” the memo read.
As the House readies its impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas, the Senate is locked in debate on a supplemental funding package that would represent a bipartisan compromise on border security. That proposed bill has yet to be unveiled as Republican negotiators face backlash from some members of their own party, including former President Trump, who have bristled at the idea of working alongside Democrats on the issue.
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