He is likely refusing to hold a public trial because he knows the charges against Secretary Mayorkas are compelling to the public, if not to two-thirds of senators.
B y all indications, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is planning to bury the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and attempting to do so without ever holding a trial. The House of Representatives impeached the sitting cabinet secretary on February 13 for his willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law and his breach of the public trust. Now, Mayorkas is only the second cabinet officer in U.S. history to be impeached.
History and precedence are important here. In our over 200 years of history, the House has sent impeachment articles to the Senate 21 times. In every instance without a jurisdictional issue or a resignation before trial, the Senate has adjudicated the matter and senators have gone on record with a vote of guilty or innocent.
While the House has fulfilled its responsibility to hold high-ranking officials accountable for their conduct, Senate Democrats want none of it. Senate leadership and the White House are already justifying their refusal to hold a trial on the charges by claiming that the impeachment itself was nothing more than a political stunt and predicated on mere policy differences that the Republican-led House has with the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
If that were the case, however, one would assume that Majority Leader Schumer would be eager to expose those motives in a Senate trial. A trial before the American people would garner immense national attention and give open-borders advocates an opportunity to prove House Republicans wrong. They could present evidence that the secretary didn’t intend to encourage millions of Americans to cross the border illegally, that he did everything within his power to stop the flood of illegal immigration, and that he didn’t intend to disregard the law which requires detention and removal of aliens who break our laws.
Instead, Schumer wants to ignore more than two centuries of precedent and table articles of impeachment, and to refuse to adjudicate despite the Senate’s consistent consideration of impeachment articles on their merits. Why? To avoid a potentially catastrophic vote and prevent media coverage of the disaster happening along our southern border.
The fact that Senate leadership is refusing to hold a public trial is a strong indication that it knows the charges against Secretary Mayorkas are compelling — so compelling that they would lead to a conviction in the court of public opinion, if not by two-thirds of the members of the Senate. In the three years Alejandro Mayorkas has served as DHS secretary, he has subverted or ignored countless federal statutes intended to prevent illegal immigration. Early in his tenure, Mayorkas officially declared in a memo to his subordinates that illegal presence in the United States is not, in itself, grounds for removal (even though the law clearly states that it is). This action alone was a de facto invitation for people to violate our laws. Consistent with that position, he reinstituted mass catch-and-release policies and abused other laws to allow illegal aliens to stay indefinitely. Some 6.2 million illegal aliens are now on the non-detained docket, made up of aliens known to have been released into the United States, including more than 400,000 known criminal aliens.
Mayorkas has outright abandoned his sworn duty to uphold our laws and protect our borders. Since January 2021, more than 10 million people — a figure equivalent to the population of Michigan — have entered the country illegally. That includes 1.8 million people who were never encountered and subjected to even the cursory checks given to those who are caught and released.
In addition to not enforcing the laws, Mayorkas has boasted about creating “new legal pathways” for people to enter the country, even though the Constitution explicitly grants that plenary authority to Congress. Foremost among those dubious pathways are categorical parole programs that allow entry of hundreds of thousands of otherwise inadmissible aliens a year. This is in clear contravention of the statute requiring such parole be on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.
As his title suggests, Secretary Mayorkas’s core responsibility is safeguarding the security of the homeland — a mandate he has subverted in pursuit of his open-borders policies. In addition to the 1.8 million “gotaways,” which almost certainly include people who pose a threat to public safety and national security, the past three years have seen a surge of people we know to be threats. Under Mayorkas’s watch, 345 suspects on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist have been encountered attempting to cross the border illegally, compared with just 14 such encounters during the previous four years. Another 70,000 Special Interest Aliens (folks who have questionable histories such as “vacationing” in places like Syria and Afghanistan) were encountered between October 2021 and October 2023.
These are but a small sampling of Secretary Mayorkas’s willful acts that place him in clear violation of his oath of office and in dereliction of his duty to secure the American homeland. All of these, and more, would be aired publicly during a Senate trial. This is why Senator Schumer is aiming to quash it. Schumer claims that Mayorkas’s impeachment was nothing more than an election-year ploy. The truth is that avoiding a Senate trial for Mayorkas would be seen by the public as a political act, one that brazenly ignored the mountain of evidence against him.
If the first impeachment of a cabinet secretary since 1876 is not brought to trial before the Senate, it will not be because the charges against him lack merit. Rather, it will be because Chuck Schumer is afraid of having to defend Secretary Mayorkas.
Ted Cruz represents Texas in the U.S. Senate and sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Dan Stein is president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.