Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) will attempt to bring impeachment proceedings against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, documents obtained by The Epoch Times show.
The move caps a full year of Republican dissatisfaction with Mayorkas, who as the DHS secretary is in charge of border security.
In the past year, the United States has seen unprecedented levels of illegal immigration.
Responsibility for the situation, according to a letter penned by Roy’s office to GOP leadership, lies squarely with Mayorkas.
“The U.S. Senate confirmed Secretary Mayorkas just over one year ago and he subsequently took an oath to ’support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic‘ and to ’well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office,'” the letter said.
“Yet, following the orders of President Biden or acting on his own—he has embarked on the purposeful abandonment of the laws of the United States and the successful policies of the previous administration to secure our borders and protect our people.
“His actions have resulted in the death and endangerment of Americans, damage to property and communities across the border, loss of operational control of our border to dangerous cartels imprisoning thousands of migrants sold into human trafficking, and the fueling of deadly drug poisonings of thousands of Americans.
“It is most certainly a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ for a public officer to purposefully endanger Americans while willfully ignoring one’s oath to enforce our laws. Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas is our duty.”
In his letter, Roy laid out a series of impeachable offenses that he said Mayorkas has committed.
He argued that Mayorkas hasn’t upheld the laws of the United States or fulfilled the duties of his office through his refusal to enforce immigration laws.
“The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has a duty as required by law to ’take all actions the Secretary determines necessary and appropriate to achieve and maintain operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders of the United States,'” Roy said.
“Secretary Mayorkas has not only failed to maintain operational control of the border, defined in law as the ‘prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband,’ but his actions have also actively facilitated the loss of it—he is an accomplice to the violation of our laws and our national sovereignty.”
Roy also argued that Mayorkas “has willfully, actively, and unnecessarily put Americans in danger” by “empowering criminal drug cartels, impairing the health of Americans with communicable diseases and lethal drugs, damaging U.S. economic health and wasting the hard-earned money of taxpayers, allowing illegal migrants to destroy private property, [and] placing American citizens at imminent risk of physical harm.”
“Secretary Mayorkas’s refusal to faithfully execute the laws has drawn hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants to the border each month—creating a completely avoidable border crisis,” Roy continued. “We have seen more than [6,000] daily apprehensions since Mayorkas took office. Far from developing policies to stem the flow, Mayorkas’s DHS continues to exacerbate this crisis.
“Secretary Mayorkas has demonstrably failed his responsibility to defend the Constitution’s requirement of the Executive to faithfully execute the laws of the United States that Congress has created,” Roy said in summary. “Secretary Mayorkas has also refused to perform his role as Secretary of DHS, which requires him to ‘achieve and maintain’ operational control of our southern border. This dereliction of duty and impeachable conduct has put Americans and migrants in harm’s way for crass political purposes.
“For these reasons, it is my recommendation that we draft articles of impeachment, present them, and make the case for his removal or to begin impeachment proceedings in the House.”
If Republicans move forward with Roy’s proposal to impeach Mayorkas, the GOP caucus will first need to introduce an impeachment resolution, which would then move to the Judiciary Committee. If a majority of the committee—which currently consists of 25 Democrats and 19 Republicans, including Roy—agrees that there are grounds for impeachment, the committee will draw up a report before sending the resolution to the floor for debate and a vote.
If a majority of House members agree to accept the charges against Mayorkas, he will be considered impeached but not yet removed from office. Because the House of Representatives is controlled by Democrats by a slim margin, Republicans will need to win a handful of Democratic votes to advance the impeachment resolution to the Senate.
In the Senate, Mayorkas would face a trial.
If two-thirds of the Senate, or 60 members, agreed that Mayorkas has committed an impeachable offense, he would be removed from office. However, Mayorkas’s removal would need the support of at least 10 Democrats and all Republicans, given the chamber’s current 50-50 split.
Roy said that the GOP should move ahead with impeachment proceedings anyway.
“We should call for it now—despite Democrat control of the House—and make the case for immediate border security better than any speeches we can give or bills we can introduce.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Mayorkas for comment.
The effort was stymied by the Democrat-dominated Judiciary Committee, but Biggs’s office says that he intends to keep the effort moving. Biggs’s spokesperson told the Epoch Times that the congressman will stand behind any effort to impeach Mayorkas.
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