House Republicans have taken another step towards impeaching Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for presiding over the nation’s ongoing immigration crisis.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the House Homeland Security Committee voted 18-15 along party lines to send two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas to the House for a vote.
The full House vote could take place as soon as next week. If the House approves the impeachment resolution, the charges would ultimately go to the Senate for a trial.
While senior House Republicans believe they have the support to impeach the DHS secretary, they can lose only two votes given their narrow majority. House Republicans are planning to check in with members this week to confirm a united front. Majority Whip Tom Emmer told CNN ahead of the markup that “we are going to have to pass that. I mean, it’s pretty egregious what he’s done.”
Speaker Mike Johnson has promised to convene the House vote on Mayorkas’s impeachment “as soon as possible.”
The impeachment charges contend that Mayorkas is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that amount to a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” on immigration and a “breach of the public trust.”
“Alejandro N. Mayorkas willfully and systemically refused to comply with the immigration laws, failed to control the border to the detriment of national security, compromised public safety, and violated the rule of law and separation of powers in the Constitution, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States,” the impeachment resolution reads.
The move to impeach a Cabinet secretary is rare — only once in American history has it been done successfully. President Ulysses Grant’s war secretary, William Belknap, was impeached in 1876, over corruption regarding his government contracts. The attempted impeachment of a cabinet secretary for refusing to uphold the law is unprecedented.
The call for the impeachment of Mayorkas comes amid growing concern over rising rates of illegal immigration. According to data released by the House GOP, fiscal year 2023 had the most illegal border crossings in the nation’s history.
Throughout the Biden administration, there have been over 7.5 million enforcement encounters nationwide and over 6 million illegal crossings. Customs and Border Protection seized more than 27,000 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal year 2023 alone. CBP reported a record number of encounters with illegal migrants at the border — over 300,000 — in December 2023.
Additionally, over 267 individuals whose names appear on the terrorist watchlist have been stopped trying to cross the southern border since Joe Biden became president. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, federal officials warned that members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah could be using the southern border as an entry point into the U.S.
The House move towards impeaching Mayorkas also follows a controversial Supreme Court decision on immigration enforcement. Last week, the Court granted the Department of Homeland Security’s emergency request to remove the razor wire Texas installed on its southern border, as the agency claimed the wire was endangering migrants and preventing Border Patrol agents from patrolling the border.
The wire was part of a wider operation in Texas to decrease the number of illegal immigrants flowing into the state. Texas’s request for more permanent relief from illegal immigration is scheduled to be argued before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals next month.