Group of Miami Cuban Americans urges GOP to drop effort to impeach Homeland secretary
A group of prominent Miami Cuban Americans is speaking out against efforts in Washington to remove the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and showing support for their fellow Cuban American in an open letter.
Health care mogul Mike Fernandez and other co-signers of the letter, shared first with the Miami Herald, wrote that Mayorkas, who was born in Havana, has a deep love for the United States. The attempt to impeach Mayorkas, they wrote, “undermines the Constitution” because Republicans are trying to remove him based merely on “policy differences.”
“We call on the Republican leadership to put aside political stunts like impeachment, and get to work to help fix our problems at the border,” the letter states. “This should be done not as Republicans or Democrats, but as patriots who were sent to Washington to work together toward the common goal of solving our nation’s problems.”
Fernandez, once a top fundraiser for Republican U.S. Senator Rick Scott, has pushed in recent years to influence immigration policy. Fernandez said in an interview that the targeting of Mayorkas hinges on the fact that he is a Democrat.
“I think they’re being very unfair to a man who obviously was given this job and has done it honestly,” said Fernandez, a former Republican who later registered without party affiliation.
Among the names included as co-signers on the letter: former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Al Cardenas, former Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas, former Miami Dade College President Eduardo Padron, and Manuel D. Medina, founder of Medina Capital Partners.
House Republicans are pushing to have Mayorkas removed from office, arguing that he is failing to keep the southern border secure and ignoring U.S. laws. But the open letter calls the impeachment process a “political stunt” by members of the GOP.
The group wrote that Mayorkas is being unfairly blamed for the issues at the border and say that during his tenure, which started in February 2021, he has worked to “modernize” the DHS by “tripling efforts to stop drugs like fentanyl from entering the country, expanding our nation’s cybersecurity efforts, and launching new cross-government efforts targeting smugglers, gangs, and cartels.”
“The son of a Holocaust survivor, Mayorkas and his family emigrated from Cuba to America for a better life. We are confident that, like us, he shares a deep and abiding love for the country that has given him so much, evidenced by his choice to dedicate his life to public service in return for the opportunities America has offered him,” wrote Fernandez and others in the letter.
The efforts to impeach Mayorkas began last year and have been led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga, and Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn, the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. A newly leaked, internal Republican memo details that the committee is planning to mark up an impeachment resolution for Mayorkas at the end of the month, according to The Hill.
The stance that Mayorkas is performing successfully in his job is hardly universal among Cuban Americans in Miami.
U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, a Republican who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, has said the “consequences of Secretary Mayorkas’ refusal to enforce our laws at the southern border are immeasurable.” Emilio Gonzalez, a former U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director appointed by George W. Bush who later ran Miami International Airport, said that Republicans want to hold Mayorkas “accountable for his performance, or lack thereof.”
“His employees ridicule and mock him, the border patrol union wants him impeached, and the American public is tired of seeing one thing and then being fed another,” Gonzalez said in an interview.
But Fernandez said he hopes for a more united government moving forward and worries for the future if the calls for impeachment and political attacks continue.
“I think that unless we change our current path we’re going to end up where other countries have ended up, which is in an autocratic environment,” said Fernandez. “The politicians that tend to attack the most seem to be focused on the past and not on the future. We need to focus on the future and what needs to happen to take us there.”
This article has been updated to clarify comments Emilio Gonzalez made about Alejandro Mayorkas.
