Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) organized a disciplined hearing that extracted helpful information and damning testimony for any effort to impeach the pro-migration homeland security chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
The March 15 hearing in Texas showed something novel — a GOP chairman of the House homeland security committee who can synchronize his committee members to ask useful questions.
Mayorkas has not yet faced such GOP discipline in prior chaotic hearings.
Chairman Green assigned himself the primary task of getting Border Patrol Raul Chief to criticize his boss’ policies.
He asked Raull Ortiz, chief of the Border Patrol, “Chief Ortiz, does DHS have operational control of the entire border?”
The question was an arrow aimed at Mayorkas, who claimed last year he had operational control of the border.
“No, sir,” Ortiz answered. “I will tell you that in certain areas, the cartels control an awful lot of the southern border.”
The exchange was a win for the GOP’s pro-impeachment wing, said Jessica Vaughan, the chief of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. “It pits a career Border Patrol official who is dealing with this day after day, month after month, against his boss [Mayorkas] who is trying to hoodwink Americans,” she said.
“Ortiz broke with the administration on several points throughout the hearing, saying he disagreed with President Joe Biden’s decision to halt border wall construction and sees the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy as a way to improve border management,” noted Bloomberg Government.
Rep. Carlos Giminez (R-FL) produced useful data by asking Ortiz: “Supposing that we have 1.3 million [spotted] gotaways that we know of, what is your estimate of the people — that we don’t know about — that got away?”
“In my estimation based upon the situational awareness that I have, probably between 10 percent and 20 percent [more untracked gotaways],” Ortiz answered.
Green sketched the scale of Mayorkas’ migration, saying:
Six million people. In just the two years of Secretary Mayorkas’ reign at DHS, more people have come into this country than all of the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency and all four years of the Trump presidency combined.
Still, Ortiz dodged other questions and disagreed with some of the GOP’s hoped-for answers.
Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX) asked “Do you believe that the cartels are acting as a terrorist organization?”
“For me, they are criminals — they’re 100 percent criminal organizations,” Ortiz responded.
But GOP leaders successfully made their detailed criticism of Mayorkas’ border policies, often arguing that his policies violated Congress’ laws.
“The Interim Final Rule [for fast-track asylum] is a rule that Secretary Mayorkas is trying to change and actually remove the judiciary branch from the decision-making on asylum,” said Green, adding:
Even though Congress passed the laws many, many years ago that said the judiciary is to be involved. Why would Secretary Mayorkas want to do away with the judiciary? Why would he want to subvert laws written by this body, the Congress? It’s because they want more people to come into the country.
Green also slammed Mayorkas’s “parole pathway” through the border, saying:
Their solution is an [cellphone] app where whomever fills it out just automatically gets parole when they show up at the crossing site. That is in total contravention to the laws passed by Congress about how people are to enter this country.
“I can see it now: Some drug cartel coyote, [says] “Hey, for an additional fee, we’ll fill the app out for you,” he added.
Nonetheless, the House is far from impeaching Mayorkas, Vaughan noted.
Some may see this as a gotcha for impeachment, but the [GOP] people who are more cautious about impeachment … [already] agree that Mayorkas is lying. They just don’t think that it’s worth the trouble to put everyone through [a time-consuming impeachment process]. They’d rather get on to trying to change the policy, of trying to change the law to prevent the abuse of the policy.
“The question is more about the tactics [of getting better policies], not about the merits” of impeaching Mayorkas, she added.
Democrats recognized the hearing as a political risk and tried to minimize the media visibility of the event by boycotting the hearing.
So Green left the Democrats’ chairs visibly empty as the cameras rolled, and said:
They said coming here was just a political stunt. You tell me: Taking a hearing to the point of the crisis for a firsthand view, or boycotting a hearing because you know we’re going to shine a light on the truth. Which of those is a political stunt?
I’d say the political stunt is these empty chairs … I guess for them, bipartisanship. is only when you agree exactly with them. To me, bipartisanship is where you sit down together, debate the issues and talk to try to find common ground and solutions.
“They’re not here — they’re AWOL,” he added.
The hearing was titled “Failure By Design: Examining Secretary’s Mayorkas’ Border Crisis.”
However, the GOP legislators focused their attention almost entirely on the border chaos, lawbreaking, cartels, and drug smuggling. They carefully avoided the bigger economic issue of immigration, and they avoided the vote-shifting, pocketbook damage done to Americans’ pocketbooks by mass migration.
Still, Green mentioned the illegal flow of indebted economic migrants into jobs and housing that would otherwise go to better-paid Americans, saying:
It’s clear to me, in violation of the laws written by the United States Congress, passed and signed by previous presidents, this [Mayorkas] wants nothing more than to flood the country with people.
[He has] empowered the narco human trafficking, trafficking terrorist cartels — the drug cartels who just captured and killed a couple of Americans are making billions — billions — bringing people into the United States, many of whom, once they’re here, have to pay the cartels back with force criminal labor.
Republicans also ignored the lethal impact of Mayorkas’ policies on the migrants, and also ignored the shameful growth of child labor caused by Mayorkas’ policies.
Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot who has said his border management is “all about achieving equity which is really the core founding principle of our country.” Mayorkas’ demand for equity implies he believes foreigners have an equal right to Americans’ jobs and homes as do Americans.
Mayorkas also rejects any criticism of his deadly, elite-backed wealth-shifting policies. “We cannot have the rights and the needs of individuals who are seeing humanitarian relief in the United States be exploited for political purposes,” he told ABC News on January 1.
Democrats acknowledged the hearings’ impact, and so tried to minimize the media visibility of the event by boycotting the hearing. Green left their chairs empty to highlight their attempt to muffle the hearing, and said:
[Democrats] said coming here was just a political stunt. You tell meL: Taking a hearing to the point of the crisis for a firsthand view, or boycotting a hearing because you know we’re going to shine a light on the truth? Which of those is a political stunt? I’d say the political stunt is these empty chairs … I guess for them, bipartisanship. is only when you agree exactly with them. To me, bipartisanship is where you sit down together, debate the issues and talk to try to find common ground and solutions.
“They’re not here — they’re AWOL,” he added.
Extraction Migration
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 to use the imported workers, renters, and consumers as fuel for Wall Street and the economy.
Biden’s flood was urged and welcomed by business groups because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries.
But the inflow also reduces marketplace pressure on CEOs to invest in productivity-boosting technology, to create jobs in heartland states, or to develop overseas markets.
It reduces economic pressure on the federal government to deal with drug epidemics and the “Deaths of Despair” crisis, and it helps to spike inflation — and reduce family formation — by boosting the price of housing.