US House impeaches Biden homeland security secretary in historic vote

The US House of Representatives has voted to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, on explicitly political charges related to conditions at the southern border as Republicans attempt to capitalize on the issue in an election year.

The evening roll call proved tight, with speaker Mike Johnson’s threadbare Republican majority and in the face of staunch Democratic opposition to impeaching Mayorkas, the first cabinet secretary facing charges in nearly 150 years.

In the historic rebuke, the House impeached Mayorkas 214-213.

Three Republicans voted against party lines. Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin, Ken Buck from Colorado, and Tom McClintock from California said the Mayorkas impeachment did not meet the bar laid out in the constitution.

Joe Biden said in a statement released after the vote: “History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games.”

Last weekend, Mayorkas told NBC that Republicans’ allegations against him were “baseless … and that’s why I’m really not distracted by them.

“I’m focused on the work of the Department of Homeland Security. I’m inspired every single day by the remarkable work that 216,000 men and women in our department perform on behalf of the American public.”

Mayorkas is also not the only Biden administration official House Republicans wish to impeach. Republicans have filed legislation to impeach a long list, including Kamala Harris, the vice-president; Merrick Garland, the attorney general; Christopher Wray, the FBI director, and Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary.

But those attempts are far from coming to fruition, unlike the situation with Mayorkas.

Mayorkas, who did not appear to testify in the impeachment proceedings, placed the border crisis squarely on Congress for failing to update immigration laws during a time of global migration.

Conditions at the border with Mexico, where numbers of undocumented migrants remain high, “certainly” represented “a crisis”, Mayorkas said.

But he said the Biden administration did not “bear responsibility for a broken system. And we’re doing a tremendous amount within that broken system. But fundamentally, Congress is the only one who can fix it.”

Last week, Republicans in the Senate abandoned and sank an immigration and border deal – proposed after extensive negotiations with Democrats – after Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee, made his opposition clear.

“House Republicans will be remembered by history for trampling on the constitution for political gain rather than working to solve the serious challenges at our border,” homeland security spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement.

“While Secretary Mayorkas was helping a group of Republican and Democratic senators develop bipartisan solutions to strengthen border security and get needed resources for enforcement, House Republicans have wasted months with this baseless, unconstitutional impeachment.”