On the eve of House Republicans’ impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, House Democratic leadership condemned the move as a political stunt.
Monday’s press conference comes one day after the Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee released draft articles of impeachment for Mayorkas, accusing him of "high crimes and misdemeanors" and intentionally disregarding immigration law.
“We don’t see the high crimes and misdemeanors standard being met,” Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., said during a livestreamed event with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other ranking members of the House Homeland Security Committee. “This is a highly focused effort led by Republicans who are just trying to drum up this notion that somehow the Republicans can ride into November.”
Calling it a “sham impeachment” and “a hit job ordered by two people — Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Jeffries accused his Republican colleagues of attempting to distract the American people.
House Republicans have repeatedly accused Mayorkas of failing to enforce U.S. immigration law. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday said the Secretary was unfit to serve because he “has the blood of 300 Americans per day on his hands from Chinese-made, Mexican cartel imported fentanyl alone” and has “aided and abetted the invasion of the world through our Southern border.”
Despite holding two impeachment hearings earlier this month, House Republicans have not produced any evidence that Mayorkas has violated the Constitution or broken the law, Jeffries said. House Democrats are willing and able to work in a bipartisan way to address the challenges at the border, he added.
On Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said border agents had recorded 249,785 encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border in December. Total encounters along the border were 302,034. Preliminary figures from the agency indicate the first two weeks of January saw 50% fewer southwest border encounters between ports of entry.
The Biden administration has proposed $14 billion to provide more asylum officers and immigration judges to the border to address a surge of migrants’ immigration requests. He has also proposed spending $1.4 billion on shelters and services for the hundreds of thousands of migrants that have arrived in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles over the past year.
On Friday, President Joe Biden said the border deal U.S. senators are negotiating is the toughest and fairest possible. He vowed to shut down the border the same day he signs it, but House Majority Leader Mike Johnson said the deal was dead on arrival without having seen the details.
Negotiated in exchange for additional funding to support Ukraine in its defense against Russia, as well as international aid for Israel and Indo-Pacific allies like Taiwan, the proposed border deal would reportedly give the president a new emergency authority to close the border when it is overwhelmed. It would also impose new limits on asylum seekers, including the right to expel migrants to Mexico once more than 4,000 migrants have attempted to cross in a single day.
“Secretary Mayorkas has been working with Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to come forward with a border policy solution. We’re now nearing the end of it,” Rep. Daniel Goldman, D-N.Y., said during the press conference.
“What the House Republicans are doing at the direction of Donald Trump, instead of going over to the Senate and working on those negotiations to pass bipartisan legislation, they are impeaching the Secretary for failing to secure the border while he is negotiating legislation to secure the border,” Goldman added. “If that is not irony, I don’t know what is.”