The House Homeland Security Committee began holding hearings on Wednesday for Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security.
Summary
The House Homeland Security Committee began holding hearings on Wednesday for Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security. House Republicans have begun an impeachment effort against Mayorkas over the historic migrant crisis on the Southern border.
- Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green is leading the effort to impeach the DHS Secretary for the Biden administration’s failure to enforce immigration laws at the southern border, which House Republicans say constitutes a “dereliction of duty.”
- Green and his committee are planning a series of hearings to make the case that Mayorkas has “intentionally disregarded the law and allowed migrants and drugs to enter the country.” Mayorkas’ comms staff at DHS released a memo claiming the hearings constitute a “baseless and pointless political attack” and are “led by extremists.”
- House Republicans called the attorneys general of Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma to testify on Wednesday about how the onslaught of migrants at the southern border has affected their states. Reuters noted that border agents have made more than 6 million arrests of migrants at the border since Biden assumed the presidency in 2021.
- The Biden administration has presided over the highest number of migrant crossings in US history, with border crossings surpassing 10,000 per day on many occasions.
- Only one US cabinet official has been impeached by Congress. Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached in 1876 over allegations of taking kickbacks in exchange for government contracts.
- Author’s note: the linked AP News article refers to Belknap as “Defense Secretary,” but is inaccurate. That position was not created until 1947 to replace the previous post of Secretary of War. We await the AP’s correction.
- “He’s bad at his job and is enforcing wrongheaded Biden administration border policies, but there is no current evidence he is corrupt or committed an impeachable offense,” argued Jonathan Turley for The Daily Beast. “Mayorkas has been denounced as dishonest, duplicitous, and derelict by his critics. In my view, all of those things are manifestly true. It is also true, in my opinion, that none of those things amount to high crimes and misdemeanors warranting his impeachment.”
- Axios reported Senate Republicans are less convinced of the need to impeach Mayorkas than their House counterparts. Axios quotes a string of GOP senators, including Sens. Mitt Romney, Shelley Moore Capito and Tommy Tuberville, who expressed skepticism about devoting time to impeaching Mayorkas without the votes to convict in the Senate.
- NBC News reported on Biden’s efforts to get Mexico to “help to fix a problem that is driving down his poll numbers.” In return, the government of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is demanding a series of steep concessions, including spending $20 billion on aid to Latin American countries, ending the US blockade of Cuba, eliminating sanctions on the leftist dictatorship ruling Venezuela and granting amnesty to 10 million illegal immigrants.
- The New York Post covered a poorly-timed admission from Mayorkas on the full extent of the administration’s “catch and release” policies. Mayorkas divulged that “above 85%” of migrants arrested at the southern border are being released into the interior of the country.
- Chairman Green wrote an editorial for Fox News making the case that there is “compelling evidence to impeach” the DHS Secretary. “More than 1.8 million known gotaways have slipped by the Border Patrol, and are now at large in communities all across the United States. That’s roughly the population of West Virginia. Worse, CBP knows nothing about these individuals, including potential criminal histories or nefarious intentions,” Green wrote. “These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. Secretary Mayorkas has demonstrated through his words and actions that he has failed to uphold his oath of office and in his duty to secure the homeland.”
- National Review’s Noah Rothman reminded readers that Biden “is not the victim of the border crisis.” Rothman continued, “The illegal migrant crisis is a fiendish problem. As negotiations in Congress over reforms to U.S. asylum law suggest, increased enforcement alone will not remedy it. But enforcement goes a long way toward ensuring that the crisis does not get measurably worse by the day. Increasing the pressures on America’s neighbors to do what needs to be done was always an “option” for Biden. He just lacked the incentive.”
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
