US House Republicans will seek to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, alleging “egregious misconduct and refusal to enforce the law” in relation to immigration policy and the southern border.
In a statement to CNN on Wednesday, a spokesperson said the House homeland security committee had conducted “a comprehensive investigation into Secretary Mayorkas’s handling of, and role in, the unprecedented crisis at the south-west border.
“Following the bipartisan vote in the House to refer articles of impeachment against the secretary to our committee, we will be conducting hearings and taking up those articles in the coming weeks.”
A spokesperson told Reuters the first hearing would be next Wednesday, 10 January.
In November, a resolution to impeach Mayorkas was blocked, and referred to the committee, when eight Republicans sided with Democrats against a measure introduced by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Trump supporter from Georgia.
Conditions at the border with Mexico have worsened and Biden officials acknowledge a backlog of 3m asylum cases. Seeking draconian reforms, Republicans have made the issue central to talks over federal government funding and aid to Ukraine.
On Wednesday, the House Republican spokesperson told CNN impeachment would “ensure that the public is aware of the scope of Secretary Mayorkas’s egregious misconduct and refusal to enforce the law”.
In return, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson accused Republicans of “wasting valuable time and taxpayer dollars pursuing a baseless political exercise that has been rejected by members of both parties and already failed on a bipartisan vote.
“There is no valid basis to impeach Secretary Mayorkas, as senior members of the House majority have attested, and this extreme impeachment push is a harmful distraction from our critical national security priorities.”
Mayorkas told NBC he would “most certainly” cooperate with impeachment proceedings, adding: “And I’m going to continue to do my work, as well.”
That work, he said, involved “join[ing] the bipartisan group of senators to work on a legislative solution to a broken immigration system. I was on the Hill yesterday to provide technical advice in those ongoing negotiations. Before I headed to the Hill, I was in the office working on solutions. After my visit to the Hill, I was back in my office, working on solutions.”
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Speaking to CNN, Mayorkas said his department did not have the resources to “perform our jobs as fully and completely as we could”.
“We need additional personnel to advance our security at the border. We need technology to advance our fight against fentanyl [coming into the US]. We need additional asylum officers to really accelerate the asylum adjudication process.”
The House speaker, Mike Johnson, was due on Wednesday to visit the border as part of a 60-strong Republican delegation. The visit underlined the political nature of immigration battles in a presidential election year.
The deputy White House press secretary, Andrew Bates, said: “After voting in 2023 to eliminate over 2,000 border patrol agents and erode our capacity to seize fentanyl, House Republicans left Washington in mid-December even as President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate remained to forge ahead on a bipartisan agreement.”
House Republicans, Bates added, had “obstructed [Biden’s] reform proposal and consistently voted against his unprecedented border security funding year after year, hamstringing our border security in the name of extreme, partisan demands”.
