(Washington Examiner) House Republicans failed to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a contentious vote Tuesday that will temporarily spare the Cabinet official from facing removal proceedings.
Lawmakers voted by a narrow margin of 214-216 to reject the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, who was confirmed by the Senate in February 2023 to lead the department’s 260,000 employees.
GOP Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Tom McClintock (R-CA), Blake Moore (R-UT), and Ken Buck (R-CO) were the only members to break with the party and vote in defense of Mayorkas. All Democrats voted against the impeachment articles.
Conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) brought the impeachment charges against Mayorkas, which were drawn up by the House Homeland Security Committee. Mayorkas was impeached on two counts: willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law and a breach of the public trust related to his handling of the border crisis.
“He’s guilty of aiding and abetting the complete invasion of our country by criminals, gang members, terrorists, murderers, rapists, and over 10 million people from over 160 countries into American communities all across the United States,” Greene said during a floor speech ahead of the vote.
Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX), who was the first lawmaker to introduce a bill to impeach Mayorkas in January 2023, said the impeachment was “richly deserved.”
“We must fire this bum, this second coming of Benedict Arnold, forthwith,” Fallon said on the floor.
Since Biden took office, more than 7.5 million illegal immigrants have been encountered attempting to enter the U.S., and 6 million of that figure entered illegally between ports of entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. The Biden figure far exceeds the number of illegal immigrants encountered during the Trump administration’s four years and the Obama administration’s eight years combined.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a leader in the impeachment effort against former President Donald Trump, validated Republicans’ point that the United States faces “serious challenges” at the border but lambasted the impeachment proceedings as politically motivated.
“This impeachment is baseless, unconstitutional, and should be defeated,” Schiff said during floor debate Tuesday.
Republicans have called for Mayorkas’s impeachment over the past three years, and Greene has twice introduced articles against Mayorkas and pushed the chamber to remove the secretary.
However, the GOP waited until the start of an election year to attempt to strip him of his title.
Ahead of the vote Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security accused House Republicans of playing politics by focusing on Mayorkas’s work rather than working collectively with Democrats on a border security bill that the Senate has labored over since last October.
“This farce of an impeachment is a distraction from other vital national security priorities and the work Congress should be doing to actually fix our broken immigration laws,” DHS said in a statement. “They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas.”
