The House Homeland Security Committee’s Republican members have accused Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of being guilty of “dereliction of duty” because of policies that have led to the unprecedented influx of people crossing the border between the United States and Mexico.
Republicans have made it plain that they consider Mr. Mayorkas’ administration to be below par, while Democrats have brushed off the move as a political attack that abuses a Congressional authority meant to penalize extreme conduct, such as criminal activity.
Mr. Mayorkas is, according to Republicans, guilty of the “gross incompetence” according to committee chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and others.
“The constitutional history is overwhelmingly clear on this subject. The Founders designed impeachment not just to remove officials engaged in criminal behavior, but those guilty of such gross incompetence that their conduct had endangered their fellow Americans, betrayed the public trust, or represented a neglect of duty.”
During his opening statements, Mr. Green went on to say that under President Barack Obama, a former DHS Secretary said that 1,000 encounters a day “overwhelm the system.”
“Secretary Mayorkas says watch encounters have never averaged less than 3,000 per day, even going as high as 10,000 to 12,000 per day. Just a few days ago, internal CBP [Customs and Border Protection] numbers leaked to the media showed another 302,000 encounters at the southwest border alone in December.
Additionally, the chairman went on to outline changes to border policy from the Obama administration to now, saying that in 2013 the Obama administration detained 82 percent of illegal aliens.
“In [Mr. Mayorkas’s] first year on the job that 82 percent number dropped to just 10 percent.”
Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) released a statement early last month about the effort to impeach Mr. Mayorkas where the member asserted that “extreme MAGA Republican effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas was fully exposed as the political stunt that it is.
“The Homeland Security Committee Chairman said he did not want to create a ‘false hope’ that his partisan investigation of the secretary would lead to impeachment,” Mr. Thompson went on.
“But now, news reports indicate that members have been promised that impeachment will move through our committee. Apparently their baseless, so-called ‘investigation’ was just a shell game to justify a pre-determined, evidence-free impeachment over policy differences rather than any Constitutional grounds.
Scholars Question Impeachment
In a letter dated Jan. 10, prominent constitutional law experts—including legal professors and scholars—have strongly criticized the efforts by House Republicans to pursue impeachment proceedings against Mr. Mayorkas.The letter, addressed to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Mr. Green, expresses the scholars’ collective view that the proposed impeachment would be unjustified as a matter of constitutional law.
The crux of the Republicans’ argument for impeachment, as outlined in the letter, revolves around their perception that Mr. Mayorkas’s policy decisions have compromised border security and involved objectionable uses of enforcement discretion.
They have also accused Mr. Mayorkas of providing false testimony regarding the enforcement of federal law and the security status of the southern border.
However, the scholars argue that the framers of the Constitution deliberately excluded “maladministration” as grounds for impeachment, emphasizing that impeachment should be reserved for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
They underscore that policy disagreements, no matter how intense, should not serve as a basis for impeachment, as it would undermine the separation of powers.
The letter contends that the charges presented by House Republicans fall short of meeting the constitutional threshold for impeachment, characterizing them as ordinary policy disputes within the realm of immigration enforcement.
Response to Questions
Mr. Green covered some of their concerns in his opening statement, saying that: “Mayorkas was made aware of testimony given by President Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, where the [attorney general] admitted the current policies are being exploited by the cartels.”According to Mr. Green’s account, Mr. Mayorkas is aware that border agents are being deployed to ports of entry instead of the unmanned areas in between, and even some officials are being “pulled from serious investigations like sex crimes, child exploitation and other atrocities to perform administrative functions at the border,” including one agent that shut down his investigations to “make sandwiches.”
According to Mr. Green, “The founders designed impeachment, not just to remove officials engaged in criminal behavior, but those guilty of such gross incompetence, that their conduct had endangered their fellow Americans, betrayed the public trust are represented a neglect of duty.”
Homeland Security responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment saying: “After decades of Congressional inaction on our broken immigration laws, Secretary Mayorkas and a bipartisan group of senators are working hard to try and find real solutions to address these challenges.”
The department outlined what it called “sham hearings” motivated by “fundraising promises,” going on to say that: “Instead of working in a bipartisan way to fix our broken immigration laws, the House Majority is wasting time on baseless and pointless political attacks by trying to impeach Secretary Mayorkas.”
