Republican lawmakers grilled Alejandro Mayorkas, the embattled US secretary of homeland security, during a House judiciary committee oversight hearing on Wednesday.
Mayorkas, who has been the target of a GOP-led congressional investigation over his handling of the US-Mexico border, faced a series of tough questions regarding his tenure as head of the department, which broadly oversees US immigration and border policies. The hearing came as some House Republicans have threatened to impeach Mayorkas, the first Latino and immigrant to head the Department of Homeland Security, over his alleged mismanagement of the border.
Mayorkas offered a pre-emptive rebuttal to Republicans’ attacks in his opening statement, noting that unlawful crossings at the southern border have decreased by more than half compared with the peak before the end of the pandemic-era policy known as Title 42.
“Our approach to managing the border securely and humanely, even within our fundamentally broken immigration system, is working,” Mayorkas said. “Under President Biden’s leadership, we have led the largest expansion of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways for people to seek humanitarian relief under our laws, at the same time imposing tougher consequences on those who instead resort to the ruthless smuggling organizations that prey on the most vulnerable.”
Congressman Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the committee, countered that attempted crossings remain far too high, and blamed the Biden administration’s policies for the situation at the border.
“I know that today Secretary Mayorkas is going to try to paint a rosy picture of this disastrous mismanagement of our border, but the numbers don’t lie,” Jordan said. “This administration has abandoned any semblance of border security and immigration enforcement.”
Democrats on the committee rejected rightwing criticism of Mayorkas, and they accused Republicans of attempting to gain political leverage by hammering Biden’s most senior domestic security official on immigration, which remains a top concern for voters.
“Today’s hearing will not be about legitimate congressional oversight or finding out the facts,” said Congressman Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee. “Instead, the chairman and his colleagues in the majority will use today’s hearing as a predicate for a completely baseless attempt to impeach Secretary Mayorkas.”
A group of House Republicans – dominated by members of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus – have been seeking to impeach Mayorkas for the majority of his tenure. A cabinet secretary has not been impeached since 1876.
Led by Andy Biggs of Arizona – who is also a member of the House judiciary committee – the lawmakers allege that Mayorkas’s leadership “directly led to an increase in illegal aliens and illegal narcotics, including deadly fentanyl, entering the United States”, according to language from the impeachment resolution introduced in the House in August 2021.
As part of the Republican-led congressional investigation launched this year, the House homeland security committee released an 111-page report accusing Mayorkas of “dereliction of duty” – a specific federal charge for service members in the US military who are found to intentionally neglect their duties – as head of the department.
During the Wednesday hearing, Biggs made the baseless argument that the number of attempted entries into the US indicated the southern border is “open”, and he charged Mayorkas with failing to uphold established immigration law.
“Congressman, the border is not open,” Mayorkas said.
Experts warn that the partisan bickering displayed on Wednesday will do nothing to address the conditions in which a record number of undocumented people are dying attempting to enter the US, due to drownings and increasingly, extreme heat.
“It’s more like a political exercise than a realistic exercise to form border policy,” said Néstor Rodríguez, an author and professor of migration at the University of Texas-Austin, of what he expects to see from GOP critics at the hearing. “I don’t expect that they’re going to talk much about how can we realistically come together to create a policy that helps deal with the border challenges.”
According to transcribed interviews with border patrol agents released earlier this month in a memorandum by Democratic members of the judiciary and homeland security committees, there has been “no crisis going on right now” at the south-west border.
Still, border enforcement is high right now, according to Rodríguez, and that’s dangerous for those defying the administration’s rules to enter the US.
“People take riskier ways to cross the border,” he said. “[T]he riskier ways add up, and more people die.”
The panel’s interrogation also comes as the Biden administration has faced backlash from both Republicans and Democrats. Following the May expiration of Title 42, which limited asylum requests during the pandemic, the Biden administration implemented new rules that in effect extended those restrictions. Some immigration advocates say its requirements for asylum seekers, such as booking appointments through a specialized Customs and Border Protection (CBP) app and trying to enter a different country before they can try the US, are dangerous for migrants and violate immigration law.
A federal judge struck down those requirements on Tuesday in a victory for those advocacy groups, although the administration has two weeks to appeal.
