The United States House of Representatives narrowly voted on Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas. In an unprecedented vote, he was accused of willfully refusing to enforce border laws and violating public trust.
In a 214-213 vote, Republicans overcame strong opposition from Democrats and reservations within their own ranks, making Mr. Mayorkas the first sitting Cabinet secretary in U.S. history to be impeached.
It amounted to a partisan indictment of President Biden’s immigration policies by the Republican Party, which wants to use a surge in migration across the U.S. border with Mexico during his term in office as a political weapon against him and Democrats in this year’s election.
Mr Biden condemned the House vote in a statement on Tuesday evening.
“History will not be kind to House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship in targeting an honorable public servant to play petty political games,” he said.
The vote came a week after the House rejected charges against Mr. Mayorkas as Republicans, who control the House by a razor-thin margin, tried to find a majority to approve it but failed.
In doing so, Mr. Mayorkas joined former presidents and administration officials who have been indicted on allegations of personal corruption and other misconduct.
But the charges against him represented a break with history because they failed to identify any such offense and instead effectively declared the policy decisions Mr. Mayorkas made to be constitutional crimes. The approach threatened to lower the hurdle for impeachment – which has already fallen in recent years – and reduce what was once Congress’s most effective tool for removing despots from power to a weapon that can be used in political battles.
Democrats, former Homeland Security secretaries, the nation’s largest police union and a chorus of constitutional law experts – including conservatives – have denounced the impeachment as an apparent attempt to settle a political dispute with a constitutional punishment. They said Republicans had presented no evidence that Mr. Mayorkas’ conduct met the standard for high crimes and misdemeanors set by the Constitution.
The impeachment charge against Mr. Mayorkas is expected to be rejected in the Democratic-led Senate, where conviction would require a two-thirds majority and where even some Republicans have already declared the effort dead. According to the office of Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and majority leader, the House is expected to send articles of impeachment to the Senate in the last week of February, and senators would be sworn in as jurors the next day.
“The only reason for this impeachment is because Speaker Johnson wants to further appease Donald Trump,” Schumer said in a statement, adding that House Republicans “have presented no evidence of anything resembling an impeachable offense.”
But House Republicans insisted that Mr. Mayorkas had failed in his duties under the Constitution and defended impeachment as necessary.
“Congress has taken decisive action to defend our constitutional order and hold accountable an official who violated his oath of office,” said Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who led the impeachment against him, Mr. Mayorkas said in a statement. The proceedings, he added, “showed beyond a reasonable doubt that Secretary Mayorkas willfully and systematically refused to comply with the laws of the United States and violated the public trust.”
Three Republicans – Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California – joined Democrats in opposing the charges. They warned that charging a Cabinet secretary for the way he did his job would weaken a serious constitutional penalty and do nothing to solve serious immigration problems.
“We have to stop using these impeachment tools — when there are political differences, we have other tools,” Buck said in an interview after the vote, adding that impeachment had “become a partisan game that, when it comes to the Interpretation of the Constitution should really be above that.”
But unlike last week, when Republican defections were enough to pass the bill, there were just enough members present Tuesday to win approval on the charges – albeit by a narrow majority. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, returned to Washington from a round of treatment for blood cancer, even though another pair of Republicans — Reps. Brian Mast and Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida — did not vote. The absence of two Democrats, Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Judy Chu of California, still allowed Republicans to prevail. Had either Democrat voted, the GOP would have failed to impeach Mr. Mayorkas a second time.
In a statement posted on social media, Ms Chu said she had tested positive for Covid-19 and would have voted against impeachment. In a video posted on social media, Mr. Mast said he and Ms. Frankel were stuck at Palm Beach International Airport waiting for a plane with mechanical problems to be repaired.
In approving the impeachment, the House also appointed 11 Republicans as impeachment managers, including Mr. Green and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the right-wing lawmaker who has led the charge against Mr. Mayorkas.
Mr. Green’s panel produced a report in which they said of the Cuban-born secretary that they would “remove Secretary Mayorkas from his post.”
The first of two indictments approved Tuesday accuses Mr. Mayorkas of using “catch and release” to enforce Trump-era policies, such as the “Remain in Mexico” program that forced many migrants to wait at the southwest border for their court dates “to have replaced “policies that allowed migrants to move freely in the United States. Republicans accuse Mr. Mayorkas of violating several provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that migrants “shall be detained” pending a decision on asylum and deportation orders, and of acting beyond his authority to arrest migrants to be released into the country on parole.
Democrats fought back vigorously, noting that Mr. Mayorkas, like any homeland security secretary, had the right to set policies to deal with the flow of migrants arriving at the border. This includes allowing certain migrants into the country temporarily on humanitarian grounds and prioritizing which migrants are being held, particularly when working with limited resources.
The second article accuses Mr. Mayorkas of betraying the public trust by misrepresenting the state of the border and obstructing congressional efforts to investigate him. Republicans are basing those allegations on a 2022 claim by Mr. Mayorkas that his department had “operational control” of the border, defined in a 2006 law as the absence of any illegal migrant or drug crossings. Mr. Mayorkas said he was instead referring to a less absolute definition used by the Border Patrol.
They also accuse Mr. Mayorkas of failing to produce documents as part of an investigation into his border policies, including materials he was supposed to hand over to them under a subpoena, and of evading their efforts to get him to testify as part of their impeachment trial to move. Administration officials countered that Mr. Mayorkas produced tens of thousands of pages of documents at the panel’s request. He offered to testify in person, but Republicans on the panel rescinded their invitation for him to appear after both sides ran into scheduling problems.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Mia Ehrenberg, criticized House Republicans on Tuesday evening, accusing them of “trampling the Constitution for political reasons instead of working to resolve the serious challenges at the border.”
“House Republicans have wrongly vilified a dedicated public servant who has spent more than 20 years enforcing our laws and serving our country,” she added. “Secretary Mayorkas and the Department of Homeland Security will continue to work every day to keep Americans safe.”
On Tuesday, just hours before the vote, the U.S. Border Patrol released new data showing that the number of migrants illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico fell 50 percent in January compared to December. But December was an all-time high and the numbers have reached record highs during the Biden administration.
The only other Cabinet secretary to ever suffer the same fate was William Belknap, Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant. Belknap resigned in 1876, shortly before the House of Representatives impeached him on corruption charges after finding evidence that he had engaged in widespread misconduct, including accepting bribes. The Senate later acquitted him.
Hamed Aleaziz and Kayla Guo contributed reporting.
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2024-02-14 02:13:05
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