The House of Representatives is poised to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas due to the ongoing invasion across America’s borders bringing in unprecedented amounts of drugs, crime, disease, chaos, misery, and death. There has never been anything like it in our history. While Mayorkas is not solely responsible for this fiasco — his boss, President Joe Biden, is ultimately accountable — Mayorkas is nonetheless guilty as a chief accomplice. The case against him is overwhelming.
Count one – countermanding federal law by facilitating mass illegal migration. Mayorkas has systematically unraveled effective Trump Era immigration enforcement and border security policies. This includes halting construction of the border wall, even portions that had already been paid for, ending the remain in Mexico policy for asylum seekers, and restricting (and later rescinding) the use of Title 42 public health authorities used to quickly expel illegal aliens during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At present, according to data from the House, approximately eight million migrants have illegally crossed into the U.S. on the secretary’s watch, costing taxpayers over $150 billion in 2023 alone, in the form of health, housing, education, and other services. In federal fiscal year (FY) 2023, nearly 1.4 million migrants were knowingly released into the country, thousands of which were young men from hostile nations, and at present there is an estimated 1.7 million “gotaways,” illegal aliens that slipped into the country without any contact with federal authorities, since Mayorkas took office.
Meanwhile, deportations as a percentage of the removable population are at all-time lows. In FY 2023, just 6% of illegal aliens were removed compared to 40% in FY 2020, the final year of the Trump Administration. In December 2023, there were 302,034 migrants encountered at the southern border, a 300% increase from December 2020 when Trump was in office. Moreover, in FY 2023, there were over 150 apprehensions of migrants on the terrorist watch list, the largest number ever recorded, and 98 in 2022, (the previous record), compared to just three in 2020, and zero in 2019, the last two years of Trump’s presidency.
Upon flooding the nation with migrants, the secretary has abused his discretion by “paroling” a record one million of them for up to several years, which entitles them to work and compete for jobs against U.S. citizens. This, despite the fact that parole is a limited authority to be used on a case-by-case basis, and doing so on such a large scale only encourages more mass migration. He also ended Trump’s “public charge” rule which made it more difficult for migrants in the country that go on welfare to become permanent residents.
Count two – actively thwarting state border security efforts. Rather than partnering with the states, Mayorkas has spent valuable time and resources dismantling border barriers installed by Texas and Arizona by having the Border Patrol cut razor wire, open gates, and remove other obstacles to mass migration. He has also opposed state efforts to apprehend and deport illegal aliens, such as the recent law passed by Texas that treats illegal border crossings as a state crime.
Count three – serially lying to Congress and the American people. Despite the calamity at America’s borders, Mayorkas has testified under oath that the Department of Homeland Security has “operational control” of the border and there is no crisis. If by control he meant intentionally left wide open, he may have been telling the truth. He also lied about the Border Patrol whipping migrants from on horseback, even though he initially defended the agents against the charge, but cowardly reversed course when Vice President Kamala Harris joined the fray against the Border Patrol after a video of the incident was made public.
Count four – engaging in a human trafficking conspiracy and empowering Mexican drug cartels by fostering lawlessness. The misery and death at the border enabled by the secretary not only impacts Americans, but the migrants themselves. In FY 2022, over 850 migrants died at the southern border trying to cross into the U.S., making it the deadliest year ever recorded. The prior record of 546 deaths was also set under Mayorkas in 2021, compared to 300 deaths in 2019, the highest number during the Trump Administration, and 247 in 2020. This chaos has helped facilitate a massive 480% spike in fentanyl seizures at the southern border in FY 2023, compared to FY 2020. In 2022, 73,654 people died from a fentanyl overdose in the US, more than double the 36,359 that died in 2019 and over 17,000 more than in 2020.
Since Mayorkas took office, more than 440,000 unaccompanied children have been trafficked or smuggled across the southern border, a record 130,000 entering in 2022 alone, with reports of child abuse skyrocketing. The Biden Administration has lost track of at least 85,000 of those children to date. Compounding these numbers, the secretary recently ended a Trump-era program of DNA testing minors and the adults they traveled with to ensure the children were at least with a family member.
Mayorkas’s defense that the law needs changing and not who occupies the secretary’s office is belied by the results of his tenure when compared with the Trump years. Indeed, it is the secretary’s intransigence in the face of his failed policies over a three-year period that sits at the core of his dereliction of duty and the ensuing destruction it has wrought. This more than constitutes the “abuse or violation of some public trust” and the ensuing “injuries done immediately to the society itself” that Alexander Hamilton wrote of in Federalist No. 65, where he addressed the standards for impeachment.
As a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security and one who worked directly for the first two secretaries, I take no joy in calling for Mayorkas’s removal and the stain it will leave on the department. Yes, immigration law needs changing but the current secretary has abdicated his responsibilities and undermined existing law at every turn, with devastating consequences.
Put Mayorkas, a Cuban Jew educated at Berkeley, in charge. What could go wrong?