WASHINGTON — House Republicans are ready to take a key vote Tuesday toward impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over what they call his “willful and systematic” refusal to enforce immigration laws as border security becomes a top 2024 election issue.
The Homeland Security Committee is pushing through a day-long hearing on two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, a rare charge against a Cabinet official unseen in nearly 150 years, as Republicans make GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s hard-line deportation approach to immigration their own.
“The actions and decisions of Secretary Mayorkas have left us with no other option but to proceed with articles of impeachment,” said Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn.
The articles charge that Mayorkas “willfully and systematically refused to comply with Federal immigration laws” amid a record surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and that he has “breached the public trust” in his claims to Congress that the border is secure. A committee vote would send the articles to the full House for a vote as soon as next week.
The House’s proceedings against Mayorkas have created an oddly split-screen Capitol Hill, as the Senate works intently with the secretary on a bipartisan border security package that is now on life support.
The package being negotiated by the senators with Mayorkas could emerge as the most consequential bipartisan immigration proposal in a decade. Or it could collapse in political failure as Republicans, and some Democrats, run from the effort.
Trump, on the campaign trail and in private talks, has tried to squelch the deal. “I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill,” Trump said over the weekend in Las Vegas.
President Joe Biden, in his own campaign remarks in South Carolina, said if Congress sends him a bill with emergency authority he’ll “shut down the border right now” to get migration under control.
The Republicans are focused on the secretary’s handling of the southern border, which has experienced a increasing number of migrants over the past year, many seeking asylum in the U.S., at a time when drug cartels are using the border with Mexico to traffic people and ship deadly fentanyl into the states.