Republicans stamped a bull’s-eye on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas when they took the House in January, but those long-threatened impeachment efforts have died off in recent weeks as the party pivots to legislating.
The GOP made removing Mayorkas from the Department of Homeland Security a front-and-center issue in the lead-up to last November’s midterm elections and continued those calls into this year, with two members introducing articles of impeachment.
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But since early March, the fanfare has died down, and the party’s focus has shifted from blaming someone for the border crisis to taking steps to end the chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border, with few GOP aides and members willing to acknowledge the lack of action on impeachment publicly.
Two GOP aides, including one in leadership, told the Washington Examiner on Monday that the party was, in fact, focusing its immediate efforts on passing legislation on immigration and border security.
A GOP leadership aide said the House committees on homeland security, judiciary, and oversight were “hard at work right now on a border package” and no impeachment action had been taken because lawmakers were “still working on their investigations into Mayorkas’s handling of the border crisis and the facts will dictate their next steps.”
In a statement provided Monday, House Oversight and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said his committee had asked senior Border Patrol agents stationed on the southern border to provide additional information about the state of the border.
“These interviews will inform future oversight so we can hold Secretary Mayorkas and others accountable for the border crisis,” Comer wrote in his statement.
A third person, a senior GOP aide, said the shift from impeachment talk was an intentional attempt to move away from that strategy, not merely a decision to focus on legislation instead.
“It’s great to have a scapegoat, but for the American people, it’s all about delivering for them,” the second GOP aide said in a phone call.
During a visit to the border two weeks after the election, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said that ending the crisis would be the House’s top priority come January and called on Mayorkas to resign or face impeachment proceedings in the new year.
McCarthy said if Mayorkas did not leave his post by Jan. 3, when the new session in Congress commenced, House Republicans would investigate “every order, every action, and every failure and determine whether we can begin impeachment inquiry.” No such determination has been made despite significant action by the committees.
The three committees have spent much time over the past three months conducting oversight and investigating how the Biden administration has handled the border since January 2021.
House committees have held more than a handful of hearings in Washington and at the southern border, where a record-high five million noncitizens have been encountered attempting to enter the U.S. illegally.
Simultaneously, individual members of Congress took action to impeach Mayorkas. House Oversight committee member Pat Fallon (R-TX) put forth three articles of impeachment, which 42 others have since co-sponsored.
Former House Freedom Caucus leader Andy Biggs (R-AZ) also debuted articles of impeachment.
In a show of how seriously Mayorkas and DHS believed Republicans would move on impeachment, DHS hired a private law firm to walk Mayorkas through possible removal proceedings.
The DHS’s solicitation of outside help indicated the department expected Republican action against Mayorkas was not a matter of if but when.
Fallon’s spokesman maintained in a statement to the Washington Examiner that anything short of impeaching Mayorkas would fall short of what the party “promised” to do before taking office.
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“As the crisis at our southern border continues, Rep. Fallon stands by the three Articles of Impeachment he introduced earlier this year,” a spokesman for Fallon wrote in an email. “House Oversight and Judiciary will both continue working to ensure that Sec. Mayorkas is held responsible. After all, this is what House Republicans promised the American people they would pursue in their new majority.”
While legal action against Mayorkas has stalled, the secretary has been quick to tout recent successes at the border, including the launch of a nationwide blitz to interdict fentanyl at the nation’s borders and cutting illegal immigrant encounters at the southern border by nearly half in January and February.
