When the House Committee on Homeland Security (HCHS) convenes today to consider two proposed Articles of Impeachment against Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a major point of contention will be four categories of statements in which Republicans claim he lied to Congress and the American public.
The “mark-up session” on the two proposed articles follows two previous hearings by the committee in which Republicans, led by Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.), made their case for removing Mr. Mayorkas. Democrats have fought the process, calling it nothing more than “a political stunt.”
The first article charges the DHS chief with a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” The second of the two proposed articles cites evidence that Mr. Mayorkas committed “a breach of public trust” by making “false statements, and knowingly obstruct[ing] lawful oversight of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), principally to obfuscate the results of his willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” The statements are considered in four categories.
The first of the four categories under the second article alleges that Mr. Mayorkas “knowingly made false statements to Congress that the border is ‘‘secure,’’ that the border is ‘‘no less secure than it was previously,’’ that the border is ‘‘closed,’’ and that DHS has ‘‘operational control’’ of the border (as that term is defined in the Secure Fence Act of 2006).
To illustrate the “false nature” of those claims by Mr. Mayorkas, the second article points out that the number of inadmissible aliens encountered by U.S. authorities at the border with Mexico averaged about 590,000 annually between 2017 and 2020. When Mr. Mayorkas took over as DHS Secretary, however, the total “skyrocketed to over 1,400,000 in fiscal year 2021, over 2,300,000 in fiscal year 2022, and over 2,400,000 in fiscal year 2023.”
The second article also notes that the number of individuals encountered at the border who are on one or more of U.S. national security terrorist watch lists totaled 11 from 2017 to 2020, compared with 331 from 2021 through the first three months of the current fiscal year.
The other three categories on which the articles claim Mr. Mayorkas lied to Congress and the public include “the scope and adequacy of the thousands of Afghans who were airlifted to the U.S.” during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that “apprehended aliens with no legal basis to remain in the United States were being quickly removed,” and that he knowingly made statements “supporting the false narrative that U.S. Border Patrol agents maliciously whipped illegal aliens.”
All 18 of the HCHS Republicans are expected to vote for both of the articles, while the 15 Democrats will unanimously oppose them.
“All they are endeavoring to do with respect to this sham impeachment is to run away from their do-nothing extreme record and try to distract the American people with this political stunt,” Mr. Jeffries told reporters.
“House Republicans have produced no evidence that Secretary Mayorkas has committed an impeachable offense. House Republicans have produced no evidence that Secretary Mayorkas has violated the Constitution. House Republicans have produced no evidence that Secretary Mayorkas has broken the law,” Mr. Jeffries continued.
The House Democratic leader told reporters the Mayorkas impeachment “is a political hit job ordered by two people, Donald Trump and [Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene [R-Ga.]. House Republicans have clearly turned their ever-shrinking House majority over to the extremists.”
Similarly, Mr. Thompson pointed out that he has been a member of the HCHS since its inception following the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, and he said, “This is a singly focused effort led by Republicans who are just trying to drum up this notion that somehow this is an issue the Republicans can ride into November.”
Democrats got a boost from an unexpected source, George Washington University School of Law Professor Jonathan Turley, a conservative legal scholar who also opposed the two impeachments by Democrats in the 117th Congress of former President Donald Trump.
“[Mr. Mayorkas] knows better. This is not by accident, this is by design, I call him the ‘architect of destruction.’ Eight million encounters. 300 on the terror watch list. [200,000] people dead now, thanks to fentanyl poisoning that this one man is responsible for,” Mr. McCaul told Fox News Sunday Host Shannon Bream.
“I think that is a dereliction of duty, and look at the Founding Fathers here; they didn’t have a lot of federal criminal statutes. ‘Breach of the public trust’ is sufficient to impeach, and I think it’s important that we respond to the American people,” he added.
The impeachment mark-up hearing begins at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday and is expected to continue throughout the day and into the evening hours, with final votes on the two articles coming around midnight or later.
