House Republicans made significant progress on Sunday, regarding their move to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas as secretary of Homeland Security due to his failure to manage the U.S. border.
Republicans unveiled two articles of impeachment, according to reports. The first article accused Mayorkas of exhibiting a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” while the second alleged that he betrayed the public trust by knowingly making false statements, and knowingly obstructing 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.) in a statement.
“The results of his lawless behaviour have been disastrous for our country,” added Green, who authored the impeachment articles.
A memo released by DHS claims that the 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.”
The articles of impeachment will be discussed by Green’s committee on Tuesday. A House floor vote on the impeachment campaign would be one step closer to approval. In a letter to colleagues on Friday, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., stated that “a vote on the floor will be held as soon as possible thereafter,” although he did not provide a time frame.
The Republican-led Homeland Security Committee has denounced Mayorkas’ introduction of several family reunification parole programs, stating that they were illegal and permitting certain foreign people to remain in the country as they awaited immigration visas. According to the first article of impeachment, Mayorkas ought to have given enforcement of the detention of individuals who had crossed the border illegally priority over other uses of resources.
In the second article, House Republicans accused the DHS secretary of lying to Congress on multiple occasions while testifying under oath that the border was secure and interfering with 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.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) earned backlash during a hearing last week after accusing Josephine Dunn, whose daughter Ashley, 26, died from fentanyl-laced tablets, that Republicans were “using” her, according to Fox News.
Republicans had extended an invitation to Dunn to attend the meeting and share her story of losing her daughter to fentanyl.
Having offered Dunn his “sincere condolences” for her daughter’s passing, the Democrat went on to say that he also wanted to “apologize in some ways” since Dunn was “being used as a fact witness for an impeachment investigation.”
He continued, saying, “Obviously, you don’t have the background to understand what a high crime and misdemeanor is and how it relates to this, given what your experience has been.”
Dunn, who told the Daily Caller on Friday 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,” was incensed by his remarks.
“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 told the outlet.
