WASHINGTON – Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas shrugged off calls Friday for his impeachment by Sen. Ted Cruz and others, accusing critics of encouraging the illegal migration they say they condemn every time they say the border is open.
Cruz, a Texas Republican, and others say Mayorkas should be impeached for failing to control the border, resulting in record levels of illegal immigration spikes in smuggling of fentanyl and other contraband.
“I’ve got a lot of work to do, and I intend to continue to do it. That’s my response,” he said, during a meeting with The Dallas Morning News editorial board.
He added that “the political cry that the border is open” – a common refrain from GOP critics – “is music to the smugglers ears, because they take that political rhetoric and they market it” to desperate migrants from Venezuela and other countries.
In an Oct. 6 letter, Cruz and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Mayorkas that “your failure to faithfully enforce this nation’s immigration laws and willful blindness to the very real humanitarian crisis at our southern border amounts to a gross dereliction of duty and a violation of your oath of office” that “could provide grounds for impeachment.”
The senators cited “shocking statistics” on Mayorkas’s watch, including spikes in drug seizures, and more than 2.1 million encounters with undocumented migrants at the southern border in the last 12 months, topping a record 1.7 million set the previous fiscal year.
Mayorkas pointed out that the vast majority of drug smuggling takes place at ports of entry.
Only one Cabinet official has ever been impeached, and he was acquitted. William Belknap, the secretary of war under President Ulysses S. Grant and a former Civil War general, was impeached on corruption charges minutes after resigning in 1876.
The Senate held the trial anyway – a precedent cited when the House impeached Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and tried after he’d left office Jan. 20.
Calls have grown from allies of Donald Trump to impeach President Joe Biden and some members of his Cabinet in retaliation for Trump’s two impeachment trials.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has played down the possibility that the House would impeach Biden if, as expected, Republicans take control in January after next month’s midterms. Mayorkas, though, may provide an irresistible target.
Eight Texas Republicans have co-sponsored a House resolution to impeach Mayorkas, on grounds that he has “presided over a reckless abandonment of border security and immigration enforcement”: Reps. Lance Gooden of Terrell, Pete Sessions of Waco, Louie Gohmert of Tyler, Michael Cloud of Victoria, Chip Roy of Austin, Brian Babin of Woodville and Randy Weber of Friendswood.
Gohmert was first to sign on, in August 2021.
“The rhetoric that I hear of invasion is very troubling,” Mayorkas said, emphasizing that not everyone caught at the border is an “innocent” person seeking job opportunities, but that is the vast majority.
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