DHSDHS Secretary Mayorkas Impeached by House

The House, by a one-vote margin, on Tuesday voted to impeach DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

In a 214-to-213 vote mostly along party lines, the House impeached Mayorkas for willfully refusing to enforce border laws and breaching the public trust.

Mayorkas is the first sitting cabinet secretary in U.S. history to be impeached.

President Joe Biden condemned the House’s vote in a statement on Tuesday night. “History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” he said.

As the New York Times notes, presidents and administration officials have been impeached in the past for personal corruption and other wrongdoings. But the charges against Mayorkas failed to identify any such offense, “instead effectively declaring the policy choices Mr. Mayorkas has carried out a constitutional crime. The approach threatened to lower the bar for impeachments — which already has fallen in recent years — reducing what was once Congress’s most potent tool to remove despots from power to a weapon to be deployed in political fights.”

Three Republicans — Representatives Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, and Tom McClintock of California — voted with Democrats against the impeachment. The three warned that impeaching a cabinet secretary for the way he did his job would weaken a weighty constitutional penalty and do nothing to address serious immigration issues.

Buck, a member of the Freedom Caucus and one of the more conservative members of Congress, said: “We have to stop using these impeachments — if you have policy differences, we have other tools.” Buck added that impeachment had “become a partisan game that, when it comes to constitutional interpretation, really should be above this.”

Former secretaries of homeland security, the U.S. largest police union, and many constitutional law experts — including leading conservatives — have harshly criticized the impeachment, saying it was a blatant attempt use a constitutional punishment to resolve a policy dispute. The critics said that Republicans had presented no evidence that Mayorkas’s conduct rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, the standard set by the Constitution for impeachment.

The charges against Mayorkas will likely be rejected in the Democratic-led Senate, where a conviction requires a two-thirds majority.

House Republicans argued that impeachment was justified because Mayorkas had failed to carry out his duties under the Constitution.

“Congress has taken decisive action to defend our constitutional order and hold accountable a public official who has violated his oath of office,” Representative Mark Green, Republican of Tennessee and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, which prepared the charges against Mayorkas, said in a statement. The proceedings, he added, “demonstrated beyond any doubt that Secretary Mayorkas has willfully and systemically refused to comply with the laws of the United States, and breached the public trust.”

The first of the two charges against Mayorkas said he replaced Trump-era immigration policies, such as Remain in Mexico, with “catch and release” policies which allowed migrants to stay in the United States. Republicans charged that Mayorkas ignored several mandates of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed DHS to detain those who crossed into the United States illegally pending decisions on asylum and removal orders. Republicans also charged that Mayorkas acted beyond his authority to parole migrants into the country.

The second article of impeachment accused Mayorkas of breaching the public trust by misrepresenting the state of the border and hobbling congressional efforts to investigate him. Republicans specifically referred to a statement by Mayorkas in 2022, in which he asserted that DHS had “operational control” over the border – but under a 2006 statute, “operational control” of the border is defined as the absence of any unlawful crossings of migrants or drugs.

Republicans have also accused Mayorkas of failing to produce documents, including materials he was ordered to give them under subpoena, during an investigation into his border policies and evading their efforts to get him to testify as part of their impeachment proceedings.

There was only one other cabinet secretary to find himself in a predicament similar to that of Mayorkas. William Belknap, the secretary of war under President Ulysses Grant, resigned in 1876 just before the House impeached him for corruption and accepting kickbacks. The Senate later acquitted him.