‘You Ought to Resign’: Senate Republicans Grill Mayorkas on Border Security, Migrant Child Labor

Senate Republicans admonished Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a Tuesday hearing, demanding that he resign or be impeached over his failure to stem record migrant encounters at the Southern border and the resulting increases in migrant child labor.

Mayorkas was in agreement that both the asylum and immigration systems are broken, but sparred with several senators on the Homeland Security Committee who sought to put the blame for the deteriorating situation on him.

“You ought to resign,” explained Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.).

“You should have resigned long ago and if you cannot change course, you should be removed from office,” asserted Senator Josh Hawley (R., M0.).

Hawley’s colleague in the lower chamber, Homeland Security Committee chairman Mark Green (R., Fla.), promised to donors he would produce charges of high crimes and misdemeanors against Mayorkas. And Senator Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) introduced a draft no-confidence resolution to put the Senate on the record on Mayorkas’s job performance.

Hawley focused his questioning on the unaccompanied children now being forced to work manual labor jobs. Citing the New York Times’s report from February, Hawley pointed to examples of minors being exploited throughout the country. “Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota,” the article read.

The Times followed up on its reporting Monday, explaining that the administration had missed warning signs about the increase in migrant child labor and the buck was being passed between the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Labor Department.

“Our responsibility is to turn an unaccompanied child over to Health and Human Services within 72 hours. We are not involved in the process of when HHS turns that unaccompanied child over to a sponsor,” explained Mayorkas, adding that Homeland Security’s worksite-enforcement strategy is now focused on unscrupulous employers, including those who exploit children. After Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) pointed out that it sounded like the buck was being passed between Homeland Security and HHS, Mayorkas clarified he hadn’t intended to point the finger and asserted the responsibility is with the government and American society as a collective.

Hawley attributed the rise in migrant child abuse to the secretary’s policies.

“This massive surge began when you came to office. In your first year in office, there was a 342 percent surge of unaccompanied children across the border,” explained Hawley. “In 2021, you made the decision to change Title 42 to allow unaccompanied children to come into the United States and then to be sent into the interior of the country. Under the last administration, children were reunited with their families in their home country. You changed that and as soon as you changed it, the numbers exploded. That is your responsibility.”

“Why should you not be impeached for this?” asked Hawley.

Mayorkas rejected Hawley’s characterizations.

“The horrific exploitation of children is something that we do not condone. You are incorrectly attributing it to our policies,” said Mayorkas. “It is stunning to me to hear you say that the prior administration reunited children with their parents.”

The secretary did not deny that the Biden administration allowed unaccompanied children to stay in the country, unlike single adults and families. Homeland Security has only removed 409 unaccompanied children despite 345,000 crossing since the beginning of fiscal year 2021, according to Fox News.

Hawley reiterated his view the administration was at fault, citing reports that its policies have led smugglers to tell migrant youth they had a better chance of being allowed to stay in the United States under Biden than they had under Trump. The Missouri senator also blamed the administration for continuing to lose track of children released into the interior.

During his questioning, Johnson probed Mayorkas on the sheer scale of the issue.

“If [border security is] a priority, how did we let 4-5 million people in this country in a little over two years?,” Johnson asked, adding that “22 states have populations less than 4 million people; 28 states have populations less than 5 million people. That is the magnitude of the problem.”

“You are failing miserably,” explained Johnson to Mayorkas, pointing out that 890 deaths have occurred at the border in fiscal year 2022. “Do you not care? Do you not have an ounce of human compassion for what your open border policy, the type of human depredation it is causing?”

Romney challenged the secretary’s high-level strategy focusing on the root causes of illegal immigration in this hemisphere, instead of focusing on border security.

“I would note note that that is an impossible task. The United States of America is always going to be a more attractive place for people to come live than in the countries that you’re describing. We have a stronger economy. People have much better lives here, much healthier lives and so forth. The idea that we’re somehow going to solve the root causes in all of Latin America of corruption, of the kind of military threats going on; it’s not going to happen. So we’re going to have to secure our border,” Romney explained.

“I would anticipate that if we continue to have the kind of global warming that we’ve been having, there’s going to be an even greater demand to move into our country,” said Romney. “All the talk about ‘we need to address root causes’…this is taking our eye off the ball, which is we need to have our border secure.”