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All Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee announced their support Thursday for impeaching Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, signaling that the case has enough votes to clear the panel and head to the full chamber for a vote.
The 18 GOP members released a joint statement saying the border is so bad, and Mr. Mayorkas so incapable, that they have no choice but to try to oust him from office over the president’s objections.
“I’m sorry, he’s got to go,” said Rep. Mark Green, committee chairman and Tennessee Republican.
He did not announce a date for a vote, but made clear time is running out for Mr. Mayorkas to mount a defense.
He has given the secretary 10 days to submit written testimony explaining his decision-making surrounding the unprecedented chaos at the border. Mr. Green said he’s tried to get Mr. Mayorkas to show up to testify in person, but the department has stymied those invitations.
The committee announced the support for impeachment at the end of a lengthy hearing where two of the witnesses were women who attributed their daughters’ deaths to the border crisis.
Tammy Nobles said her daughter Kayla Hamilton was slain in Maryland in 2022 by a migrant who came to the U.S. as illegally as a child and was released despite having been involved with MS-13 in El Salvador.
Homeland Security failed to vet him and missed his MS-13 tattoo. The government released him to an unverified sponsor from whom the boy fled, ending up living in the trailer park with Hamilton, whom authorities say he strangled with a phone charging cord. He stole $6.
Also testifying was Josephine Dunn, who choked back tears as she said her daughter Ashley would have been celebrating her 29th birthday on Thursday. Instead, she died in 2021 from a fentanyl overdose.
“Under Secretary Mayorkas’ leadership — or lack thereof — fentanyl is an invasion. The weapon of mass destruction has caused unimaginable numbers of deaths, unmeasurable damage to our country’s families, including our own,” Ms. Dunn said.
She condemned Mr. Mayorkas for declining to appear to testify at the hearing, saying he “couldn’t even be here to face me today. Whatever he’s doing that is more important than facing me today, I don’t know what that could be.”
Mr. Mayorkas’ office has said he wants to testify but was involved in critical border negotiations with Mexican officials this week and couldn’t make Thursday’s hearing.
The Homeland Security Committee is pursuing impeachment after the House voted in bipartisan fashion late last year to refer Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment resolution to the panel.
To impeach an officer requires only a majority vote in the House. If successful, the matter then moves to the Senate, where it requires a two-thirds vote to convict and remove someone from office.
No sitting Cabinet member has ever been impeached, though one of President Grant’s War Department secretaries resigned before he could be impeached. The House voted to impeach him anyway, but he was later acquitted by the Senate.
Democrats say the case against Mr. Mayorkas is a political attack based on policy differences, not on crimes worthy of impeachment under the Constitution.
Republicans say the secretary has earned impeachment by lying to Congress and the public, failing to carry out the laws on immigration enforcement, flouting court rulings and being incompetent at securing the border.
In Thursday’s hearing, Democrats countered the searing testimony of the two mothers with a Princeton University law professor, Deborah Pearlstein, who said she was there to talk only about constitutional law.
She said Mr. Mayorkas’ behavior doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment, adding that the border’s problems lie with Congress, not with the secretary.
“The action under consideration here, impeachment, isn’t a tool of policy change, particularly the impeachment of a single Cabinet official who can be replaced by another official given precisely the same role [and] will have no effect on the heartbreaking problems we have heard described,” Ms. Pearlstein said.
Republicans answered by playing audio of a 2019 podcast appearance by Ms. Pearlstein — during impeachment proceedings against then-President Trump — where she said impeachment was meant to handle cases of “serious offenses against the public trust.”
Mr. Green then turned to the women who lost daughters and asked them if they considered the border chaos an offense against the public trust.
They both replied: “Yes.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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