OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
House Republicans on Sunday took a big step forward on a previous threat to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his handling of the ongoing border crisis.
According to reports, Republicans unveiled two articles of impeachment, with the first charging Mayorkas with displaying a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” while the second article argues that he breached public trust by having “knowingly made false statements, and knowingly obstructed lawful oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.”
“These articles lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) in a statement.
“The results of his lawless behavior have been disastrous for our country,” added Green, who authored the impeachment articles.
DHS responded Sunday with a memo claiming that Republicans “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.”
NBC News noted:
Green’s committee will consider the articles of impeachment on Tuesday. Approval would move the impeachment effort one step closer to a floor vote in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a letter to colleagues Friday that “a vote on the floor will be held as soon as possible thereafter,” but did not specify a date.
The Republican-led Homeland Security Committee has criticized Mayorkas’ implementation of a series of family reunification parole programs that allowed certain foreign nationals to wait in the U.S. for immigration visas, calling the moves unlawful. The first article of impeachment argues that Mayorkas instead should have prioritized resources for enforcing detention of people who illegally crossed the border.
The department claimed on Sunday that under the Immigration and Nationality Act, DHS has adhered “to the mandatory detention requirements of the INA to the maximum extent possible” but that a “standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS Secretary since the Department was founded.”
The second article charges Mayorkas with lying to Congress when he claimed under oath on various occasions that the border was secure while also hampering congressional oversight.
“Congress has a duty to see that the executive branch implements and enforces the laws we have passed. Yet Secretary Mayorkas has repeatedly refused to do so,” Green said on Sunday. “His lawless behavior was exactly what the Framers gave us the impeachment power to remedy. It is time we take this affront to a coequal branch of government, to the Constitution, and to the American people seriously.”
Last week during a hearing to examine potentially impeaching Mayorkas, which he did not attend, a Democrat made what many observers believe is a horrific remark to a grieving mother who lost her daughter to a fentanyl overdose.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) claimed to Josephine Dunn, whose 26-year-old daughter Ashley lost her life to fentanyl-laced pills, that she was being “used” by Republicans, Fox News reported.
Dunn had received an invitation from Republicans to participate in the hearing and recount her experience of losing her daughter to fentanyl.
Expressing his “sincere condolences” to Dunn for the loss of her daughter, the Democrat then claimed he wanted to “apologize in some ways” to her because she was “being used as a fact witness for an impeachment investigation.”
Then he said: “Obviously, given what your experience has been, you don’t have the background to understand what a high crime and misdemeanor is and how it relates to this.”
His statement drew the ire of Dunn, who related to the Daily Caller on Friday that Goldman is “unaware about what my understanding, about what my education, what my experience is in any of those areas when it comes to misdemeanors or high crimes.”
“I have my opinions, and for him to assume that I want to just put more money into a system that has had plenty of money placed into it and is still broken is incorrect. Please don’t think for me. I have a brain. I can think and speak for myself,” she told the outlet.
