House Republicans are hopeful that private admissions about the state of the southern border from interviews with Border Patrol officials will be enough to swing their case and garner enough votes to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Chairmen of the House Homeland Security Committee and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability released a 40-page report Tuesday that detailed what several regional Border Patrol chiefs disclosed to them in interviews from last spring and summer.
“These transcribed interviews have given our Committees, and now the American people, some shocking insights into the consequences of the Secretary’s refusal to enforce the law and secure our borders,” said House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) in a statement. “Accountability is desperately needed at the highest levels of the Department of Homeland Security.”
The level of accountability that Green said Mayorkas deserves is being brought in the form of impeachment, a measure that has not been carried out against a Cabinet official by Congress in 150 years and what one major conservative constitutional attorney has said is unfounded.
As Jonathan Turley wrote in a Daily Beast op-ed earlier this month, despite Republicans’ complaints about Mayorkas being “dishonest, duplicitous, and derelict,” he had not done anything in the realm of high crimes or misdemeanors.
Republicans’ newly published report “Crisis at the Border: Reports from the Frontline” states that federal officials said strong consequences for illegal entry at the border were necessary, the border wall was critical, and targeting criminal organizations that profit from human smuggling was key. It also examined why more illegal immigrants are coming to the United States from countries historically never seen as places with high sending numbers.
The agent’s statements were previously published in November and December 2023 but were issued again in the form of this new document Tuesday, two days before the House Homeland Security Committee reconvenes for a second hearing on impeaching Mayorkas. The first hearing occurred last week, with state attorneys general testifying about the impacts of the border crisis on their constituents.
“The men and women on the frontline of the worst border crisis in U.S. history confirmed to our committees we must return to deterrent policies on the border,” said House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY). “The Biden Administration has failed to secure our southern border and provide those who bravely attempt to control the border sectors with the adequate tools to do so.”
The Department of Homeland Security, in response, pointed to a memo it issued earlier this month as impeachment talk was ramping up on Capitol Hill.
The memo stated that the Biden administration, including three years with Mayorkas at the helm of the DHS, had intercepted more fentanyl, stopped more illegal immigrants, and removed more people than any other identical period of time under other White House administrations.
“This unprecedented process, led by extremists, is harmful to the Department and its workforce and undercuts vital work across countless national security priorities,” the DHS wrote in the memo. “Unlike like those pursuing photo ops and politics, Secretary Mayorkas is working relentlessly to fix the problem by working with Republican and Democratic Senators to find common ground and real solutions.”
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A spokesperson for House Homeland Security Democrats shared a written statement that it issued in late 2023 when the transcribed interviews with Border Patrol officials first debuted.
“These investigations [questioning of the agents] have amounted to little more than an embarrassingly transparent effort to find some basis to justify Republican calls to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas,” the Democrats memo stated. “Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green made this clear when, before conducting a single transcribed interview, he informed donors that he would deliver impeachment charges based on Secretary Mayorkas’s ‘dereliction of duty and his intentional destruction of our country through the open southern border.’”
