House Republicans made significant progress on Sunday in their efforts to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas due to his handling of the ongoing border crisis.
Republicans just announced not one but two articles of impeachment. The first charges Mayorkas with displaying a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” while the second states that he “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.).
“The results of his lawless behavior have been disastrous for our country,” added Green.
DHS responded by 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 reported:
“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 Biden admin claimed that under the Immigration and Nationality Act, DHS has complied with “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.”
Mayorkas is accused in the second article of providing false information to Congress by repeatedly asserting under oath that the border was secure, while simultaneously obstructing 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.”
During a recent hearing to investigate the possibility of impeaching Mayorkas, a Democrat allegedly made a comment that has been widely criticized. The remark was directed towards Josephine Dunn, a grieving mother who tragically lost her daughter to a fentanyl overdose.
According to Fox News, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) accused Dunn of being “used” by Republicans during the hearing. This comment came after Dunn had been invited by Republicans to share her heartbreaking story and provide insight into the devastating effects of fentanyl.
It is important to approach such sensitive matters with empathy and respect, acknowledging the pain and loss experienced by individuals like Josephine Dunn.
The Democrat then claimed he wanted to “apologize in some ways” 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.”
Dunn was furious, stating 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 said.