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      House Republicans move to impeach homeland security secretary

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      House Republicans voted along party lines after midnight on Wednesday to move toward impeaching the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for a “willful and systematic” refusal to enforce immigration laws as border security becomes a top 2024 election issue.In a charge against a cabinet official unseen in nearly 150 years, the homeland security committee debated all day on Tuesday and well into the night before recommending two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas to the full House.The committee Republicans voted in favor, while the Democrats unified against, 18-15.The partisan showdown reflected the Republicans’ efforts to make the Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s hardline deportation approach to immigration their own.That approach was mirrored on a second front on Tuesday, as Republicans also lambasted the border deal recently brokered between the Joe Biden White House and a bipartisan group of senators, Democrats and Republicans alike.Mayorkas, in a letter sent to the Republican chair of the House committee on homeland security before the hearing began, dismissed the impeachment process against him as “politically motivated”.“I have been privileged to serve our country for most of my professional life. I have adhered scrupulously and fervently to the oath of office I have taken six times in my public service career,” Mayorkas wrote.“I assure you that your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me from the law enforcement and broader public service mission to which I have devoted most of my career and to which I remain devoted.”The Republican chair of the committee, Mark Green of Tennessee, criticized Mayorkas’s letter as an inadequate response to concerns about the situation at the US-Mexican border, where arrests for illegal crossings have reached record highs.“This 11th-hour response demonstrates the lack of seriousness with which Secretary Mayorkas views his responsibilities,” Green said. “We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer. The time for accountability is now.”Democrats retorted that Republicans were making a farce out of the impeachment process by rushing to oust a cabinet official without showing any wrongdoing. House Republicans have presented no clear evidence that Mayorkas committed high crimes and misdemeanors, which is the requirement for impeachment. Their resolution accuses the cabinet secretary of refusing to comply with the law and breaching public trust.“We’re here based on two completely fabricated, unsupported and never-used-before articles of impeachment,” said the Democratic congressman Dan Goldman. “This is completely debasing and demeaning the impeachment clause of the United States constitution, and it is a gross, gross injustice to the credibility of this institution.”Now that the Republican-controlled committee has advanced the resolution, the House speaker, the Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has indicated that the full chamber will vote on impeaching Mayorkas in the coming days. Even if the resolution passes the House, it will certainly fail in the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority.To demonstrate his scorn over the proceedings, the ranking Democrat on the committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, introduced several procedural motions to delay the progress of the hearing.Thompson accused Republicans of attempting to impeach Mayorkas to boost the political prospects of Trump.“If House Republicans were serious about improving conditions along the border, they would provide the department the funding necessary to do so. They have not,” Thompson said. “They don’t want progress. They don’t want solutions. They want a political issue. And most of all, they want to please their disgraced former president.”Meanwhile, as the House moves forward with impeaching Mayorkas, Trump has called on Republicans to sink the border deal. Johnson has said that the proposal, a bipartisan arrangement that would grant Joe Biden the authority to shut down the border between ports of entry when attempted crossings increase to a certain level, would be “dead on arrival” in the House.Johnson is expected to address the House on Wednesday. At a press conference on Tuesday, he dismissed claims that Republicans were doing Trump’s bidding as “absurd” and insisted they were focused on addressing the situation at the border.“Our duty is to do right by the American people, to protect the people. The first and most important job of the federal government is to protect its citizens. We’re not doing that under President Biden,” Johnson said. “Our majority is small. We only have it in one chamber, but we’re trying to use every ounce of leverage that we have to make sure that this issue is addressed.”The White House attacked Johnson for flip-flopping, noting that the speaker previously called on members of both parties to “come together and address the broken border”.“Today, Speaker Johnson claimed he believes action should be taken to secure the border,” said the White House spokesperson Andrew Bates. “That’s exactly what President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate are doing. Speaker Johnson should join them.” More

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      Biden vows to ‘shut down the border’ if Senate immigration bill is passed

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      Joe Biden said on Friday that the border deal being negotiated in the US Senate was the “toughest and fairest” set of reforms possible and vowed to “shut down the border” the day he signs the bill.The bipartisan talks have hit a critical point amid mounting Republican opposition. Some Republicans have set a deal on border security as a condition for further Ukraine aid.Earlier in the day, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said the deal is “dead on arrival” in its current form, according to a letter to Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives reviewed by Reuters.Biden, a Democrat seeking another term in the 5 November elections, has grappled with record numbers of migrants caught illegally crossing the US-Mexico border during his presidency. Republicans contend Biden should have kept the restrictive policies of Republican former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for his party’s nomination.“What’s been negotiated would – if passed into law – be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” Biden said in a statement.“It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”The White House has agreed to new limits on asylum at the border, including the creation of an expulsion power that would allow migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally to be rapidly returned to Mexico if migrant encounters surpass 4,000 per day, three sources familiar with the matter said.If encounters pass 5,000 per day, the use of the expulsion authority would become mandatory, according to the sources who requested anonymity to discuss details of the private negotiations.In December, encounters averaged more than 9,500 per day, according to US government statistics released on Friday.The sweeping authority would be comparable to the Covid-era Title 42 policy put in place under Trump during the pandemic and which ended under Biden in May 2023.Migrants trying to claim asylum would still be able to do so at legal border crossings if the expulsion power was in effect, one of the sources said.The US would be required to allow at least 1,400 migrants per day to approach legal crossings to claim asylum if the expulsions were in effect, the source added.The bill aims to resolve asylum claims in six months without detaining migrants, the source said, faster than the current process, which can take years.Trump, however, took to social media last week to warn against any deal that fails to deliver everything Republicans want to shut down border crossings.Biden also urged Congress on Friday to provide the funding he asked for in October to secure the border.“This includes an additional 1,300 border patrol agents, 375 immigration judges, 1,600 asylum officers, and over 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop fentanyl at our south-west border,” the president said. More

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      Aid to Ukraine and Israel in doubt as House speaker says he won’t support deal

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      The prospects for the US Congress approving new aid to Ukraine as well as military assistance to Israel worsened on Friday after the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said he was unlikely to support a deal under negotiation in the Senate that is considered crucial to unlocking the funds.A bipartisan group of senators have for weeks been looking for an agreement to implement stricter immigration policies and curtail migrant arrivals at the southern border with Mexico, which have surged during Joe Biden’s presidency. Republicans have named passing that legislation as their price for approving aid to Ukraine, whose cause rightwing lawmakers have soured on as the war has dragged on and Donald Trump, who has been ambivalent about sending arms to Kyiv, draws closer to winning the Republican presidential nomination.While the precise details of the immigration bargain have yet to be released, Johnson told his Republican colleagues in a letter that “if rumors about the contents of the draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway”.Underscoring his stridency on the topic, Johnson reiterated his demand that the Democratic-controlled Senate vote on the Secure the Border Act, a hardline proposal that would essentially resurrect Trump’s immigration policy by restarting construction of a wall on the border with Mexico and forcing asylum seekers to wait in that country while their claim is processed.He also announced the chamber would move ahead with its plan to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, whom Republicans have accused of mishandling border security.“When we return next week, by necessity, the House Homeland Security Committee will move forward with Articles of Impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas. A vote on the floor will be held as soon as possible thereafter,” Johnson wrote.The speaker’s demands cast into further doubt on Congress’s ability to find agreement on reforming the immigration system – which has for decades been one of the most intractable issues in Washington – as well support two countries the Biden administration considers national security priorities. The United States has been the top funder of Kyiv’s defense against the Russian invasion that began in February 2022, and after Hamas’s 7 October terror attack against Israel, Biden argued in an address from the Oval Office that the two country’s causes were linked, and asked Congress to approve aid to both, as well as funds for Taiwan and to further secure the border.Johnson responded by having House Republicans approve a bill that would fund aid to Israel alone and also cut the Internal Revenue Service’s budget, boosting the federal deficit. Democrats, who control the Senate, have rejected both that measure and the Secure the Border Act, leaving the bipartisan immigration reform negotiations as the last avenue remaining to win approval of Ukraine aid.Congresses and presidents since the days of George W Bush have tried and failed to reform the US’s system for admitting workers and immigrants. The long odds of the latest negotiations succeeding were underscored on Wednesday when Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, told his lawmakers that because Trump wanted to campaign on immigration reform, he doubted that the party would support any agreement that emerges from the talks.“We are in a quandary,” McConnell said, according to Punchbowl News. “The politics of this have changed.”Senators from both parties expressed outrage, with Chris Murphy, the main Democratic negotiator in the talks, saying: “I hope we don’t live in a world today in which one person inside the Republican party holds so much power that they could stop a bipartisan bill to try to give the president additional power at the border to make more sense of our immigration policy.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe following day, Politico reported that McConnell changed his tone, telling Republicans in a meeting that he still supported the talks. But the damage may well have been done.The GOP’s control of the House means that Republicans may have the votes to impeach Mayorkas, and, at some point, Biden, whom the party has also opened an inquiry against. But the Senate’s Democratic leaders are almost certain to reject the charges against the homeland security chief, who has used his appearances before Congress to describe the country’s immigration system as “broken” and urge reforms.On Friday, the top Democrat on the homeland security committee sent a letter to its Republican chair, Mark Green, objecting to the charges against Mayorkas, noting that the House hasn’t voted to approve the impeachment and that Green had reportedly promised donors months ago that he’d go after him.“Nothing about this sham impeachment has abided by House precedent, but all of it has been done to reach the predetermined outcome you promised your donors last year,” the committee’s ranking member, Bennie Thompson, wrote. More

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      Mitt Romney: Trump’s call to stonewall Democrats on immigration ‘appalling’

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      Donald Trump’s directive to congressional Republicans to not agree to a deal with Democrats on immigration and border control is “appalling”, Mitt Romney said.“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” Romney, the Republican senator from Utah, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday.“And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame [Joe] Biden for it is … really appalling.”Having won in Iowa and New Hampshire and with only the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley still in the race, Trump is the clear favourite for the Republican presidential nomination to face Biden in November.His progress has not been impeded by 91 criminal charges, attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress and assorted civil trials.It was widely reported this week that Trump has sought to dynamite Senate talks for an immigration deal long linked to prospects of a new aid package for Ukraine.Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, reportedly acknowledged that Trump’s opposition makes it highly unlikely immigration talks will succeed, given hardline Republicans’ hold on the House and its speaker, Mike Johnson, a far-right congressman from Louisiana.Romney is a former Massachusetts governor who became the Republican nominee for president in 2012 before winning a Senate seat in Utah in 2018.Though he flirted with working for Trump when he won the White House, Romney has since emerged as a constant opponent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe sole Republican to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, for seeking political dirt in Ukraine, Romney was one of seven senators to find Trump guilty in his second such trial, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.On Thursday, Romney said: “The reality is that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border, and someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved, as opposed to saying: ‘Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’” More

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      US border policy deal within reach despite efforts by Trump to derail it, senators say

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      Congressional negotiators said a border deal was within reach on Thursday, despite efforts by Donald Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill to derail the talks.With the fate of US aid for Ukraine hanging in the balance, the outlook for border compromise had appeared grim following reports on Wednesday night that the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, was walking away from a compromise that he suggested could “undermine” Trump’s chances in a November general election against Joe Biden. But by Thursday afternoon, senators involved in the discussions were insisting that the opposite was true: an agreement was within reach and legislative text could be released in the coming days.Referring to Trump as the “nominee”, McConnell reported told Republicans in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday night that “politics on this have changed”, according to a report in Punchbowl News. With Trump as their likely standard bearer, he suggested that it would be unwise to move forward with a bipartisan immigration bill that could possibly neutralize one of Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell said, referring to Trump.“That’s like parallel universe shit,” Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina involved in the negotiations, fumed to reporters on Thursday. “That didn’t happen.”It would amount to a surprising about-face for McConnell, a strong supporter of sending aid to Ukraine and no friend of the former president, who has leveled racist broadsides against McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, and mercilessly disparaged the Republican leader as an “old crow”.Walking through the Capitol on Thursday, McConnell told Bloomberg News that the immigration talks were “ongoing”. Later he reportedly assured his confused conference that he was “fully onboard” with the negotiations, and brushed off reports that suggested otherwise.The proposal under discussion in Congress would have changed immigration policy to discourage migration. It would include major concessions from Democrats on immigration in exchange for Republican support on passing military assistance to Israel and Ukraine, a country whose cause the party’s far right has turned against.But the politics of a deal have only become more challenging as Trump consolidates support from Republican officials in what many view as his inevitable march toward the GOP nomination.On social media, Trump implored Mike Johnson, the arch-conservative House speaker, not to accept a deal “unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions and Millions of people”.Failure to strike a deal would have global implications, with the Pentagon warning that Ukrainian soldiers on the frontlines of its grinding war with Russia risk running out of ammunition. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said the “future of the war in Ukraine” and the “security of our western democracy” depend on Congress reaching an agreement.Biden had requested tens of billions of dollars from Congress to send aid to Ukraine and Israel as well as to allies in the Asia Pacific region. But the funding package has been stalled for months in Congress amid Republican demands for dramatic changes to border policy.View image in fullscreenSenate Republicans who support the border talks said the party should seize the opportunity to address the record rise of people arriving at the US southern border, a situation both parties and the White House have described as a crisis.“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” the Utah senator Mitt Romney, a Republican who has pressed his party to approve military aid for Ukraine, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday. “And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”He continued: “The reality is that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved as opposed to saying: ‘Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven in less contentious times, immigration remains one of the thorniest issues in American politics, and efforts to reform the nation’s outdated system have failed repeatedly. But as an unprecedented number of people fleeing violence, poverty and natural disasters seek refuge at the US-Mexico border, the issue has become top of mind for many Americans who overwhelmingly disapprove of the Biden administration’s handling of the matter.Trump has already made immigration a central issue of his campaign, outlining a draconian vision for his second term that includes mass raids, detentions camps and more funding to build his long-promised wall along the border with Mexico.Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill have argued that a bipartisan deal would only serve to give Biden political cover without actually solving the problem. Others argue that the Senate plan was designed to force the hand of the Republican-controlled House, where the speaker is under pressure from the far-right flank of his party not to compromise on the issue.At a press conference earlier this week, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, denounced the proposal, the details of which have not yet been released, as a “stinking pile of crap” that “represents Senate Republican leadership waging war on House Republicans”.Cruz alleged that the negotiators involved cared only about supporting Ukraine and not fixing the issues at the southern border.If a deal falls apart, Schumer and Biden will be forced to look for alternative legislative paths to approving aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. But with Republicans demanding border security measures in exchange for their votes, it remains far from certain that tying the aid to must-pass spending bills or bringing it to the floor as a standalone measure would garner the necessary 60 votes in the Senate.The world will likely know soon whether a deal is possible, the Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, one of the Democratic negotiators, told reporters on Thursday.“I think the Republican Congress is going to make a decision in the next 24 hours as to whether they actually want to get something done or whether they want to leave the border a mess for political reasons,” he said. More

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      US supreme court allows border patrol to cut razor wire installed by Texas

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      The Biden administration is allowed to cut the razor wire deployed by Texas at the border with Mexico, the US supreme court ruled on Monday.The concertina wire, deployed at the direction of the Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, runs roughly 30 miles (48km) along the Rio Grande river, near the border city of Eagle Pass. It is part of Abbott’s broader fight with the Biden administration over immigration enforcement and what he calls “Biden’s reckless open-border policies”.It has also become a symbol of America’s broader political fight over the control of the nation’s border with many Republicans hailing it as tough, but necessary policy, and many Democrats decrying it as inhumane and cruel.Border security and immigration officially fall under the purview of the federal government, as decided in the 2012 supreme court case, Arizona v United States. The court held that federal immigration law preempted Arizona’s immigration laws.In a narrow 5-4 vote, the supreme court has now granted an emergency appeal from the Biden administration.The ruling now means the lone star state must comply with the Biden administration and allow federal authorities access to the border, contrary to recent actions taken by state.Texas officials have argued that federal agents cut the wire to help groups crossing illegally through the river before taking them in for processing. A federal appeals court last month forced federal agents to stop cutting the concertina wire.Texas officials earlier this month refused an order from the Biden administration to allow US border patrol agents access to a part of the US-Mexico border that is now under the state’s control. Last week, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton rejected orders for the state to stop controlling Shelby Park, a public park and entry point into the US.A number of migrants have crossed at Eagle Pass in recent months.“We are not allowing Border Patrol on that property anymore. We’re not going to let this happen anymore,” Abbott said at the time.The refusal to obey federal orders cost lives, the department of homeland security said. The agency reported three migrants, two of whom were two children, drowned near the park federal authorities were restricted from entering.In addition to wire, Abbott has also authorized installing floating barriers in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass and allowed state troopers to arrest and jail thousands of people suspected of migrating illegally on trespassing charges – initiatives taken under Operation Lone Star, a joint effort between the Texas department of public safety and the Texas military department that began in 2021 to curb illegal immigration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Biden administration is also challenging those actions in federal court.In court papers, the administration said the “fencing further restricts Border Patrol’s ability to reach the river in particular areas”.Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor sided with the administration. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas voted with Texas.No explanations for their vote were provided by any of the justices.
      The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Republicans make wild claims about the dangers of immigration. Here’s the truth | Robert Reich

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      Trumpist Republicans are using the surge of illegal immigration at the southern border of the US, as well as a surge of migrants seeking legal asylum, to threaten a government shutdown and no added funds for Ukraine.They’re using five lies to make their case.1. They claim Biden doesn’t want to stem illegal immigration and has created an “open border”.Rubbish. Since he took office, Biden has consistently asked for additional funding for border control.Republicans have just as consistently refused. They’re voting to cut Customs and Border Protection funding in spending bills and blocking passage of Biden’s $106bn national security supplemental that includes border funding.2. They blame the drug crisis on illegal immigration.Last Wednesday, at the southern border in Texas, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, claimed that “America is at a breaking point with record levels of illegal immigration. We have lethal drugs that are pouring into our country at record levels.”Rubbish. While large amounts of fentanyl and other deadly drugs have been flowing into the United States from Mexico, 90% arrives through official ports of entry, not via immigrants illegally crossing the border. In fact, research by the Cato Institute found that more than 86% of the people convicted of trafficking fentanyl across the border in 2021 were US citizens.3. They claim that undocumented immigrants are terrorists.Johnson also charged that “312 suspects on the terrorist watch list that have been apprehended – we have no idea how many terrorists have come into the country and set up terrorism cells across the nation.”Baloney. America’s southern border has not been an entry point for terrorists. For almost a half century, no American has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States that involved someone who crossed the border illegally.Johnson’s number comes from government data showing that from October 2020 to November 2023, 312 migrants – out of more than 6.2 million who crossed the southern border during these years – matched names on the terrorist watch list.It’s unclear how many were actual matches and whether the FBI considered them national security threats (the watch list includes family relations of terrorist suspects, many of whom are not considered to be involved in terrorist activity).4. They say undocumented immigrants are stealing American jobs.Nonsense. Evidence shows immigrants are not taking jobs that American workers want.And the surge across the border is not increasing unemployment. Far from it: unemployment has been below 4% for roughly two years, far lower than the long-term average rate of 5.71%. It’s now at 3.7%.5. They claim undocumented immigrants are responsible for more crime in the US.More baloney. In fact, a 2020 study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cited by the Department of Justice, showed that undocumented immigrants have “substantially” lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants.Similarly, a recently published study in the American Economic Journal – analyzing official data from 2008 to 2017 on immigration, homicide and victimization surveys – found “null effects” on crime from immigration.Notwithstanding the recent surge in illegal immigration, the US homicide rate has fallen nearly 13% since 2022 – the largest decrease on record. Local law enforcement agencies are also reporting drops in violent crime.Who’s really behind these lies?Since he entered politics, Donald Trump has fanned nativist fears and bigotry.He’s now moving into full-throttled neofascism, using the actual rhetoric of Hitler to attack immigrants – charging that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and saying they’re “like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”He promises to use the US military to round up undocumented immigrants and put them into “camps”. That demagoguery is being echoed by Trump lackeys to generate fear and put Biden on the defensive.Does the US need to address the border situation? Yes – which Biden is trying to do. But we need to do so in a way that treats migrants as humans, not political pawns.Trump and his enablers want Americans to forget that almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to the US under duress, or simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      House Republicans move forward to impeach homeland security head

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      House Republicans barreled ahead with their effort to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his handling of the US’s southern border, as their party attempts to make immigration a defining issue of this year’s presidential election.The House homeland security committee launched the impeachment proceedings on Wednesday, with Republicans charging that Mayorkas has been derelict in his duty to secure the US-Mexico border amid a sharp rise in migration while Democrats and administration officials assailed the inquiry as a “sham” and a “political stunt”.“This is not a legitimate impeachment,” said Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the panel. Echoing constitutional experts and conservative legal scholars, Thompson added: “You cannot impeach a cabinet secretary because you don’t like a president’s policy.”At Wednesday’s hearing, titled Havoc in the Heartland: How Secretary Mayorkas’ Failed Leadership Has Impacted the States, the panel’s chairman, Representative Mark Green, Republican of Tennessee, declared that he had a “duty” to pursue impeachment against Mayorkas, arguing in a combative closing statement that it was the appropriate punishment for the secretary’s “piss-poor performance” controlling the flow of migration and drugs into the US.He charged that Mayorkas, a former federal prosecutor, had “brazenly refused to enforce the laws passed by Congress” and has “enacted policies that knowingly make our country less safe”. As a result, Green said, Republicans were left with “no reasonable alternative than to pursue the possibility of impeachment”.The investigation into Mayorkas’s handling of the nation’s borders is being led by the House homeland security committee, as opposed to the House judiciary committee, which typically oversees impeachment proceedings but is presently consumed by Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.If Republicans are successful, Mayorkas would be the first cabinet secretary impeached in nearly 150 years.Yet across the Capitol, Mayorkas has emerged as a central figure in the bipartisan Senate negotiations over how to respond to the rise in migration at the US border with Mexico. It creates an odd juxtaposition in which House Republicans are trying to impeach an official with whom Senate Republicans are working to try to strike a border security deal.Record numbers of people are arriving at the southern US border each day, though crossings have recently fallen. The influx, as many as 10,000 arrivals on peak days, has strained border patrol resources as well as the public services in many cities and towns across the country.The situation at the US-Mexico border is an acute political vulnerability for the president, who has been unable to stem the flow of people from across the western hemisphere traveling north to escape violence, political upheaval, poverty and natural disasters.Unease among some House Republicans over their effort to impeach Biden despite a failure to uncover any evidence of misconduct has appeared to only strengthen the party’s appetite for bringing articles of impeachment against Mayorkas.In November, shortly after Republicans elected Mike Johnson as their new speaker after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia attempted to force a snap impeachment of Mayorkas. Eight House Republicans joined with Democrats to block the effort, instead sending her resolution to the House homeland security committee.Now, as the problems at the border deepen and polling shows Republicans with a clear advantage on the issue of immigration and border security, some of those Republicans appear newly willing to support the impeachment effort.Green has indicated that he hopes to move quickly with the impeachment proceedings. But with their razor-thin majority, House Republicans would need near-total unanimity to levy articles of impeachment against Mayorkas.If the House impeaches Mayorkas, it is extremely unlikely two-thirds of the Senate, narrowly controlled by Democrats, would vote to convict him.Austin Knudsen, one of three Republican state attorneys general who testified before the panel on Wednesday, said Montana was on the frontline of the fentanyl crisis, accusing the Biden administration’s border policies of having “poured gasoline on this fire”.Knudsen, along with Gentner Drummond of Oklahoma and Andrew Bailey of Missouri heralded the hardline enforcement actions taken by Donald Trump and blamed the current challenges on Biden’s decisions to stop future construction of his predecessor’s border wall and end of Covid-19 era policy to swiftly expel migrants. (Several miles of the border wall have been built since Biden took office.) Trump, the Republican frontrunner for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, has vowed even more draconian measures if he is elected to a second term.In her line of questioning on Wednesday, Greene, who sits on the homeland security panel, asked each Republican witness if he believed Mayorkas should be impeached. They agreed unequivocally that he should be.Representative Dan Goldman, a Democrat of New York who was the lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, scoffed at their determination, arguing that the attorneys general were not experts on the matter of impeachment and all had joined a lawsuit suing the Biden administration over its border policies.“We have Republicans suing Secretary Mayorkas to stop him from implementing his policy to address the issues at the border. And now we’re going to impeach him because you say he’s not addressing the issues at the border,” Goldman said. “Which do you want?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFrank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri school of law and author of the book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump who counts Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, as a former student, was the lone voice of dissent on the panel. He argued that Mayorkas’s conduct did not rise to level of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, far from it.“If the members of the committee disapprove of the Biden administration’s immigration and border policies, the constitution gives this Congress a wealth of legislative powers to change them,” he said. “Impeachment is not one of them.”During the hearing, Democrats readily acknowledged the challenges at the border, but said impeaching Mayorkas was not the solution. They implored Republicans to work with them to overhaul the nation’s outdated immigration system, expand work permits and increase funding for border agents.Representative Delia Ramirez, a Democrat of Illinois, said it was Republicans, not Democrats, who were failing to take the “humanitarian crisis within our borders seriously”.“Impeachment will not make our borders any safer for our communities or for asylum-seekers and it will not address the conditions across Latin America that motivate families to migrate across the jungles and deserts to our southern border,” she said.Several conservative lawmakers are unhappy with the direction of the bipartisan Senate talks, demanding Congress go further to restrict asylum laws. Some are threatening to block a funding bill and risk a government shutdown if Congress fails to take up Republicans’ hardline border security demands.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican of New York who represents a district carried by Biden in 2020, was emphatic that the proceedings were about accountability and not political theater. He cited comments by the Democratic leaders in his state who have pleaded for more federal help to deal with the migrant crisis in New York.“This isn’t a narrative,” he said. “It’s not one created by Republicans.”In a memo released ahead of the hearing, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) slammed the proceedings as a “baseless political attack” and a distraction from the efforts underway to find “real solutions” to fix the nation’s beleaguered immigration system.The agency highlighted comments made by Republican lawmakers and conservative legal scholars who disagreed that Mayorkas had committed impeachable offenses.And contrary to Republican claims of an “open” border, the DHS memo said that agents had removed or expelled more than 1 million individuals encountered at the border in both fiscal years 2022 and 2023, with more removals in 2022 than any previous year. It estimated that the annual rate of apprehensions under the Biden administration was 78%, “identical” to the rate under the Trump administration.They also noted increased efforts in stopping the flow of fentanyl, noting that the agency has “stopped more fentanyl and arrested more individuals for fentanyl-related crimes in the last two years than in the previous five years combined”.“This unprecedented process, led by extremists, is harmful to the Department and its workforce and undercuts vital work across countless national security priorities,” the memo said. “Unlike like those pursuing photo ops and politics, Secretary Mayorkas is working relentlessly to fix the problem by working with Republican and Democratic Senators to find common ground and real solutions.” More