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As <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">President Biden</a> faces intensifying pressure over a record influx of migrants last month, House Republicans ramped up the long-simmering effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas heading into the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">2024 election</a> on Wednesday during the first hearing on the issue.

During the hearing, Republicans did not clearly articulate what formal charges will brought against Mayorkas. But they maintained that Mayorkas has been derelict in his duty to secure the border, citing a 2006 law that requires the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to maintain “operational control” over the border.

Republicans lawmakers also referenced an extensive report completed by the GOP-led House Homeland Security Committee at the end of last year in which investigators concluded that Mayorkas failed to “enforce laws passed by Congress” and “fulfill his oath of office.”

Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) said the investigation’s findings make it clear that Mayorkas is “the architect of the devastation that we have witnessed for nearly three years.”

Green said the findings, “coupled with the secretary’s refusal to change course on the reckless decisions facilitating this crisis, have left us with no reasonable alternative than to pursue the possibility of impeachment.” But he did not clearly explain what impeaching Mayorkas would accomplish.

Marvin Joseph

The renewed focus on the impeachment case against Mayorkas, the face of one of the country’s most intractable issues, also comes as some far-right Republicans are pressuring House GOP leadership to force a government shutdown over proposed changes to immigration law.

Mayorkas squarely disputed Republicans’ allegations in remarks he delivered in Eagle Pass, Tex., on Monday during a visit to the southern border, where he also made the case for additional funding to boost resources, reduce the immigration court backlog, combat drug smuggling, and quicken the processing, detention and potential deportation of migrants.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats criticized House Republicans’ move to impeach their way through what is largely viewed as a policy dispute and noted that neither they nor their witnesses have provided evidence of impeachable offenses.

“There is nothing that you have put forward today that evidences in any way an impeachable offense by Secretary Mayorkas,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.). “A dislike of the president’s policy is not a basis for impeachment. A basis for impeachment is corruption, abuse of power, betrayal of the nation.”

Frank O. Bowman III, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law and a witness for Democrats at the hearing, argued that Republicans’ interpretation of impeachment law in the Mayorkas case is flawed, noting that, according to the Constitution, impeachment “is not supposed to be a routine tool to resolve ordinary public policy debates, even very passionate ones.”

“It is instead a measure of last resort, reserved, as one framer put it, for great and dangerous offenses,” Bowman said. “In other words, for official misconduct, which is extraordinarily serious in degree and critically of a type that corrupts or subverts governmental processes or the constitutional order itself.”

Bowman noted that, so far, there is no suggestion that Mayorkas committed offenses of that level.

Immigration experts who testified before Congress over the past year have also poked holes in the GOP’s thesis that Mayorkas has committed high crimes and misdemeanors by failing to uphold the law, arguing that insufficient resources at DHS have historically prevented any administration from completely executing some laws pertaining to immigration and the border. U.S. agents reported nearly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2024/01/02/us-border-mexico-migrants-closures/" target=_blank>250,000 illegal</a> crossings along the southern border in December — the highest one-month total ever — according to data released by Customs and Border Protection.

In an <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/homeland-security-chief-alejandro-mayorkas-failures-are-not-impeachable" target=_blank>op-ed</a> published ahead of the hearing, Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University legal scholar who has previously appeared as a fact witness for Republicans during congressional hearings, argued that “being bad at your job is not an impeachable offense” and that “there is also no current evidence that [Mayorkas] is corrupt or committed an impeachable offense.”

“He can be legitimately accused of effectuating an open border policy, but that is a disagreement on policy that is traced to the President,” Turley argued.

But Republicans on Wednesday remained steadfast that they have a strong enough argument to impeach Mayorkas.

“The constitutional history is overwhelmingly clear on this subject: The founders designed impeachment not just to remove officials engaged in criminal behavior, but those guilty of such gross incompetence that their conduct had endangered their fellow Americans, betrayed the public trust, represented a neglect of duty,” Green said.

When Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) asked Green how impeaching Mayorkas would solve the country’s issues at the border, Green appeared unable to give her a direct answer.

“What you really want to do is get rid of President Biden. You want to get rid of President Biden, and then perhaps you can put your own secretary in there that will come up with different policy,” Titus told him. “But just impeaching Mayorkas — we’ll have another appointment of another secretary who follows the policy of the administration. And you won’t like that, either.”

During the hearing, several GOP state officials detailed how cities across the country have been affected by the surge of migrants entering the country through the U.S.-Mexico border and accused Mayorkas of directly causing harm to Americans by enforcing the administration’s immigration policies.

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, serving as a witness for Republicans at the hearing, said the “most devastating effect of the open border” on Montana has been the influx of fentanyl and methamphetamine.

“The Trump administration overcame fierce opposition at every turn and was able to gain control of our southern border as no previous administration could,” Knudsen said. “But all of that progress has been destroyed. Secretary Mayorkas is the architect of that destruction.”

Democrats, meanwhile, accused Republicans of using the threat of a Mayorkas impeachment as political messaging ahead of the 2024 election. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (Miss.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, accused Green of going to “deep-pocket” Republican donors, telling them to “get the popcorn” and promising them to impeach Mayorkas to rile up the GOP base.

“This is not a legitimate impeachment,” Thompson said. “Republicans want to throw political red meat to their base and keep that campaign cash coming.”

Even some Republicans who favor impeaching Mayorkas acknowledged that doing so would fail to resolve the broader issues that plague the U.S. immigration system. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said Tuesday that if Mayorkas is impeached, Biden is likely to “put somebody else probably … worse” in the job. But he said that shouldn’t stop Republicans from trying to remove him because of what Norman called Mayorkas’s “bad judgment.”

However, unlike the parallel impeachment proceedings initiated against President Biden, even vulnerable Republican lawmakers view the push to impeach Mayorkas as more politically palatable and have quickly coalesced around the effort, according to lawmakers and staffers involved with the latest impeachment target. With a two-vote margin in the House, support from all factions to impeach Mayorkas suggests the push could be successful along party lines. Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) have previously been critical of the Mayorkas impeachment attempt, though it’s unclear where they currently stand on the matter.

Senior House GOP staffers predict the proceedings against Mayorkas will move swiftly and face little resistance in the conference — a notable contrast with the effort to impeach Biden. While Republicans in December unanimously voted in favor of authorizing an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/12/biden-impeachment-inquiry-meaning/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">impeachment inquiry</a> into Biden, members have been reluctant to proceed with a formal impeachment vote as committee investigators have struggled to produce direct evidence that the president benefited financially from his son’s foreign investment deals.

House Republicans <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/22/mccarthy-mayorkas-border-impeachment/" target=_blank>campaigned on</a> impeaching Mayorkas during the 2022 midterm elections, with many operatives at the time saying it would be the lowest-hanging fruit — a surefire win for the GOP majority as management of the country’s southern border remains a galvanizing issue for the base.

That unity does not apply to the Biden impeachment effort, however, and some Republican lawmakers and aides have speculated that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has expedited the Mayorkas vote as the conference enters another consequential election year to appease a far-right base clamoring for accountability. But a person close to Johnson, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail internal discussions, noted that House Republicans have spent the past year working to build a case against Mayorkas — it’s just received less media attention than other GOP-led investigations.

Johnson last week led a visit with GOP lawmakers to the U.S.-Mexico border amid Senate negotiations over $14 billion in additional funding for border operations and the U.S. immigration court system as a part of a broader $110 billion package that includes funding for Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. security priorities.

But House Republicans have pushed for the Senate to take up a bill passed in May with only GOP support, called H.R. 2, that would resurrect Trump-era border policies, including restarting the building of the border wall and restricting the asylum process. It would also modify the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/20/border-migrants-parole/" target=_blank>parole system</a> — a program the Biden administration unilaterally expanded in 2023 to allow migrants temporary residency in the United States for humanitarian or other urgent reasons.

Hard-liners have suggested that it’s worth shutting down the government in the coming weeks rather than continuing to fund existing policies that they say have contributed to the influx of migrants. But Biden officials and Democrats have largely rejected their proposed changes, instead pushing for increased funding for additional U.S. Border Patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges.

Mayorkas on Monday argued that while additional funding is necessary to increase the United States’ ability to quickly process and deport migrants who are ineligible to stay in the country, Congress must act quickly to reform a broken immigration system.

“We now need Congress to do their part and act,” Mayorkas said. “Our immigration system is outdated and broken and has been in need of reform for literally decades. On this, everyone agrees.”

As one side of the Capitol has moved to impeach Mayorkas, he’s worked closely with a bipartisan group of negotiators in the Democratic-controlled Senate to hash out a deal that would narrow the pool of people who are eligible for asylum interviews, and essentially close the border on days it is overwhelmed with people by expelling migrants and expediting certain types of deportations.

Mayorkas has become a key player in the negotiations, meeting with the group daily ahead of the Christmas recess. His close involvement in discussions has continued in the new year, and Republican senators involved with the negotiations have tacitly acknowledged that the issue is grounded in policy. If the House ultimately does impeach Mayorkas — making him the first Cabinet member to be impeached in almost 150 years — he is unlikely to be convicted in a trial in the Senate.

“It’s not dereliction of duty if Secretary Mayorkas is actually trying to negotiate legislation that would address the issues at the border — it’s harder to impeach someone who’s actively negotiating to try to solve the problem that they are trying to impeach him over,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) told reporters Tuesday.

Leigh Ann Caldwell, Liz Goodwin and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.

Harvard University, BA IN Government

Jacqueline Alemany is a Congressional Investigations reporter for The Washington Post. Previously, she was the author of The Early 202, The Post's flagship early morning newsletter featuring news critical to the nation’s many power centers. Alemany is also an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.

Jacqueline Alemany

George Washington University, BA in political communications

George Washington University, MA in strategic communications

Marianna Sotomayor covers the House of Representatives for The Washington Post. Sotomayor joined The Post in 2021 from NBC News.

Marianna Sotomayor

Northwestern University, BS in Journalism

Northwestern University, MS in Journalism 

Mariana Alfaro is a reporter for The Washington Post's breaking political news team. The El Salvador native joined The Post in 2019. Before that, Mariana interned at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Insider, and The Texas Tribune. 

Mariana Alfaro

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