House Republicans on Wednesday opened a series of hearings dedicated to impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — embarking down the road of removing a Cabinet secretary for the second time in history.
In many ways the hearing was like any other the House Homeland Security Committee has held over the past year — focusing on the “havoc” immigration has created in the heartland, a nod to a popular Republican refrain that every state is now a border state.
But in a shift, the witnesses — three state attorneys general and a law professor — were asked to be experts on impeachment, with members squaring off over whether Republicans had found any evidence to back the constitutional standard of removal from office for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) gave a more than 20-minute opening statement, a lengthy departure from the usual five-minute allotment, walking through what he said is the evidence that supports “pursu[ing] the possibility of impeachment.”
He has previously said, however, that an impeachment resolution for Mayorkas has already been drafted.
“Secretary Mayorkas is the architect of the devastation that we have witnessed for nearly three years,” Green said.
“What we’re seeing here is a willful violation of his oath of office,” he added, repeating a claim he has forwarded without evidence that “this is an intentional crisis.”
The GOP effort to impeach Mayorkas has picked up as some Republicans express hesitation about a separate impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
But Democrats argued Republicans have failed to identify any impeachable offense, and that they are instead trying to remove Mayorkas because they dislike the policies of the Biden administration.
“Republicans disagree with the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies. They’re angry that this administration won’t take babies from their moms or put kids in cages like the last administration. You cannot impeach a Cabinet secretary because you don’t like a president’s policies,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the top Democrat on the panel.
“That’s not what impeachment is for. That’s not what the Constitution says.”
While some Republicans such as Green have claimed Mayorkas is derelict in his duty to manage the border, it’s not clear that is an impeachable offense or even a legal term outside its use in the military.
Republicans have also accused Mayorkas of lying to Congress — a claim that largely rests over testimony he’s given where he’s maintained the government has operational control of the border, which the GOP disputes.
Republicans have mainly pointed to his testimony about the Secure Fence Act, which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country. No secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection.
Mayorkas’s numerous responses to whether he has operational control of the border were laid out in a memo from Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a House Judiciary Committee member who has called for his impeachment.
“I do, and congressman, I think the secretary of Homeland Security would have said the same thing in 2020 and 2019,” Mayorkas said in a 2022 exchange when asked if he met the standard. Republicans have pointed this exchange out as an example of Mayorkas lying to Congress.
In a July hearing, Mayorkas said: “With respect to the definition of operational control, I do not use the definition that appears in the Secure Fence Act. And the Secure Fence Act provides statutorily that operational control is defined as preventing all unlawful entries into the United States. By that definition, no administration has ever had operational control.”
Mayorkas has argued the law puts the onus on the secretary to maximize their resources to have the most effective results possible.
Green on Wednesday also slammed Mayorkas for failing to detain a sufficient number of migrants and releasing those who pass an initial screening into the country to pursue an asylum claim, a process provided for under law.
He also criticized Mayorkas’s expansion of parole authority — which allows for temporarily admitting those who might otherwise not meet immigration requirements — something he called an unprecedented abuse of a law designed to address unique humanitarian instances such as for those seeking medical care.
“I’m still struggling to understand what high crime they believe the secretary has committed,” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) said of his Republican colleagues.
“Under the Biden administration, Secretary Mayorkas has removed 3 million undocumented people from this country. So when I hear my colleagues say that deportation does not exist, I can think of 3 million people who would disagree with that,” said Magziner, who also noted the secretary has continued construction of a border wall criticized as ineffective by Democrats because it was required under a law passed by Congress.
While impeaching Mayorkas could be an easier lift than impeaching Biden, it’s gotten some pushback in Republican circles, including a Tuesday op-ed by conservative legal scholar and regular GOP witness Jonathan Turley. He said the party lacked evidence to support a Mayorkas impeachment that he also cast as a policy dispute.
Republicans plan to hold additional hearings weighing Mayorkas’s impeachment, with Bloomberg Government reporting leaders would invite the secretary to appear for a hearing Jan. 18, though it is not clear whether he’s accepted the invitation.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) expressed confidence the House would impeach Mayorkas, a move not seen since the 1870s and that still requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate.
“We’re going to impeach him. He’s going to be impeached, and he should be,” he said.
And Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) criticized Democrats as diminishing the impact immigration and the border has had on the U.S.
“To suggest this hearing is tantamount to nothing more than a discussion of policy differences is to fundamentally deny the seriousness, the scope, the scale of the catastrophe at our southern border,” she said.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said he saw incongruities between the stated theme of the hearing and the focus on impeachment, saying the three attorneys general were not impeachment experts but rather political officials who have sued the Department of Homeland Security.
“It’s the same hearing you’ve had 10-12 times. Same pig, different lipstick, because we’re now going to call it an impeachment hearing,” he said.
“We have Republicans suing Secretary Mayorkas to stop him from implementing his policy to address the issues of the border,” Goldman said, including one that would require migrants to first apply for asylum elsewhere, a variation on an earlier Trump policy.
“And now we’re going to impeach him because you say he’s not addressing the issues at the border.”