Heritage: Border Chief Mayorkas Must Be Impeached

Congress must impeach homeland security chief Alejandro Mayorkas because he deliberately violates Congress’ laws, says the Heritage Foundation.

“The constitutional order of the U.S. republic cannot be maintained when the civil officers of the United States defy the will of Congress and refuse to enforce the laws they are trusted to uphold — even more so when those officers act in direct violation of those laws,” says the foundation’s legal-style condemnation.

The report continued:

The extraordinary wrongdoing of Secretary Mayorkas makes it … the duty of the House of Representatives to [impeach because] “impeachment is part of democratic constitutional governance, not an exception to it.”

The legal-style brief also includes much political and moral condemnation of Mayorkas’ pro-migration, anti-American policies:

He has orchestrated policies for the mass release of huge numbers of illegal aliens into the U.S. in violation of law … [he] deliberately encouraged and incentivized more than 6 million aliens from 160 different countries to put their lives in the hands of ruthless cartel members and smugglers as they embarked on the dangerous trek to enter the U.S. illegally.

Secretary Mayorkas’s policies and actions have resulted in the expansion of the Mexican drug cartels’ operational control of the U.S. border, along with their capacity to increase their vast and complex networks into the U.S. …

This new [parole pipeline] process has allowed Secretary Mayorkas to claim an improvement in the crisis at the border and a lessening of the strain on border officers—but it has institutionalized his violations of law by establishing a new [parole] pathway attracting an ever-increasing flood of aliens to gain quick entry into the U.S. and be released en masse and dispersed to all parts of the country without regard for the requirements of the U.S. Constitution, immigration laws, or the deleterious effects on local communities.

The report downplays the economic damage to swing-voting Americans inflicted by Mayorkas, but does spotlight the vast number of migrants killed by Mayorkas and his progressive allies:

As a result of his actions, Secretary Mayorkas has presided over the deadliest border in American history. In FY 2022, 853 aliens died, exceeding the prior year’s record of 546 alien deaths at the border.

The Heritage report was backed by Rep. Anthony Biggs (R-AZ), who is also sponsoring a bill impeaching Mayorkas:

It’s all laid out here. My colleagues and I have a congressional responsibility to impeach Mayorkas. If we can’t impeach him, then we can’t impeach anybody.

Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) has also filed articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) has been calling for Mayorkas’ impeachment since 2021.

Pro-impeachment GOP legislators are already using their majority status in the House to conduct a legal-style investigation of Mayorkas’ actions and statements. Those actions include the no-paperwork release of roughly 600,000 economic migrants into the U.S. workplaces and housing markets and the creation of new parole pipelines that smuggle even more job-seeking migrants into the United States via the hard-to-track “parole pipeline.” Mayorkas is also accelerating the inflow of foreign graduates into the Fortune 500 white-collar jobs needed by many swing-voting U.S. graduates.

Mayorkas can be impeached by a House majority. But the Senate acts as a judge in any impeachment process. So the Democrats’ majority in the Senate will likely prevent the two-thirds vote needed to eject Mayorkas from his office.

But the debate over Mayorkas can also shape the 2024 election.

In general, business groups pressure the media to minimize media coverage of the huge size of Biden’s migration. They also pressure GOP politicians to minimize any mention of migration’s pocketbook impact on Americans’ wages and housing prices.

Donald Trump pushed past the pressure in 2016 and won the election. But donor pressure kept the issue out of the 2020 election and so Trump lost.

Pressure from GOP donors also kept the issue out of the headlines in 2022, so helping prevent the election of a strong GOP majority committed to pro-American reforms.

The impeachment debate will help reformers “to lay out a case and they are going to have to be methodical about it,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. he added:

The goal is to force the media to cover what’s been going on at the border, to shed light on what he’s been doing … The political objective here is to is to increase public awareness of how bad this administration’s immigration policies are … and this is a way of raising the importance of the issue for more voters and informing voters [how Biden’s deputies] do not see that the stakeholders for America’s immigration policy are America’s own citizens rather than the immigrants themselves.

Impeachment advocates must also overcome the breakaway faction of business-funded, pro-migration GOP legislators who will likely join with Democrats. For example, Politico reported on February 1:

“I do think what’s going on at the border is negligence, dereliction of duty, but I’m not convinced that impeaching Mayorkas is going to solve the problem. I think we need the election in 2024 to change the White House,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said, though he cautioned that hearings could give a better sense of how voters feel about the issue.

Others, including Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), have warned that they think the party needs to focus on policies like fighting inflation. And then there’s border Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), emerging as a vote to watch in the GOP-controlled House, who is viewed as an impeachment skeptic after describing it in January as a “in case of emergency break glass” option.

GOP leaders are waiting to see how the pro-impeachment legislators build their legal, political, and polling argument for an impeachment debate before the critical 2024 election. “The thing that we can do is we can investigate, and then that investigation could lead to an impeachment inquiry,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told CNN in January.

The impeachment case may be strengthened by the Supreme Court when it rules on the legality of Mayorkas’ catch-and-release asylum policies in the next few months.

The Heritage report will help the GOP build caucus-wide support for Mayorkas’s impeachment. The report concludes:

Article I: Violations of Oath of Office

Secretary Mayorkas has violated his oath of office by deliberately failing to enforce the laws he is charged with faithfully executing and by using the power of his office to act in contravention or direct violation of those laws, including by (1) approving policies and giving directions for granting mass parole and release to large numbers of aliens, treating them as refugees or “asylum seekers” without the effective case-by-case assessments of their eligibility for refugee protection that are required by statute; (2) directing his subordinates at the Department of Homeland Security not to detain aliens who are required by law to be detained pending resolution of their asylum reviews and not to pursue deportation of large numbers of aliens who are in the United States illegally and who are by law deportable …

Article II: Abuses of Power

Secretary Mayorkas has abused the power of his office and has acted in reckless disregard of the consequences of his actions to the profound detriment of the American people, including by (1) adopting policies, engaging in conduct, and making public statements that have enticed aliens, including unaccompanied minors, to seek asylum claims that he knows or should know are meritless, thereby precipitating a border, national security, and humanitarian crisis at the southern border; (2) putting American communities and the American public in danger through the mass release, refusal to deport, and organized transport and dispersion of illegal aliens to every district of the country, without effective screening and without regard to whether they are criminals, drug traffickers, or human traffickers; (3) putting the health and safety of Americans at dire risk by allowing a flood of fentanyl and other poisonous drugs into the United States through his open-border policies and failing to screen illegal aliens for COVID-19 …

Article III: Betrayals of Trust

Secretary Mayorkas has betrayed the trust of the American people, including by (1) lying to Congress and in his public statements about the nature, extent, and causes of the disaster at the border and the failure of his department, at his direction, to screen aliens adequately and to enforce the requirements of the immigration laws; (2) lying to Congress about his department’s security screening of Afghan evacuees following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan; and (3) deceiving the public with misleading statements or through the withholding of information to hide and cover up the nature and consequences of his disastrous open-border policies …

In public, Mayorkas’ deputies dismiss the impeachment push.

“Secretary Mayorkas is proud to advance the noble mission of this Department, support its extraordinary workforce, and serve the American people,” a DHS statement said.

The Department will continue our work to enforce our laws and secure our border, while building a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system … Members of Congress can do better than point the finger at someone else; they should come to the table and work on solutions for our broken system and outdated laws, which they have not updated in over 40 years.

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.