The House Homeland Security Committee released draft articles of impeachment Sunday against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The first article of impeachment against Mayorkas is for “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and the second is for “breach of the public trust,” according to a copy obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The committee held two hearings recently on impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas that centered around his handling of the southern border and heard the testimonies of Republican attorneys general, legal experts and mothers who’ve lost their kids to fentanyl and an MS-13 gang member.
The first article surrounds the record levels of migrants coming illegally and getting released into the country that has happened under Mayorkas’ watch. One of the ways the committee believes Mayorkas played a role in the issue is through a September 2021 memo in which he directed his agency to limit immigration enforcement.
“The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” Mayorkas wrote in the previous memo.
Border Patrol recorded more than 2.2 million encounters of migrants crossing the southern border illegally in fiscal year 2022 and more than 2 million in fiscal year 2023, according to federal data. Between October and December, there have been more than 629,000 illegal encounters at the southern border.
The second article asserts that Mayorkas lied to Congress when he said the southern border is “secure,” “no less secure than it was previously,” that it’s “closed,” and that DHS has “operational control” of the area. One section of the article points to Mayorkas’ previous statements supporting a false narrative accusing Border Patrol agents of “whipping” illegal migrants in September 2021.
A federal investigation later found that the agents didn’t engage in any whipping.
“These articles lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment. He has willfully and systemically refused to comply with immigration laws enacted by Congress. He has breached the public trust by knowingly making false statements to Congress and the American people, and obstructing congressional oversight of his department,” the committee’s chairman, Mark Green, said in a statement to the DCNF.
“These facts are beyond dispute, and the results of his lawless behavior have been disastrous for our country. Empowered and enriched cartels, mass fentanyl poisonings, surges of terror watchlist suspects, more criminal illegal aliens causing harm in our communities, and traumatized and exploited migrants will be Secretary Mayorkas’ open-borders legacy,” Green said.
DHS believes the committee’s actions are “unconstitutional and evidence-free,” according to an agency memo obtained by the DCNF.
“This markup is just more of the same political games from House Homeland Security Committee (CHS) Republicans. 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 memo states.
“This farce of an impeachment is a distraction from other vital national security priorities and the work Congress should be doing to actually fix our broken immigration laws,” the memo states.
The committee will hold a markup of the impeachment articles on Tuesday.
Jennie Taer on January 28, 2024
