Impeach Mayorkas

National Review Online

Friday, January 12, 2024

 

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas doesn’t bear ultimate responsibility for the administration’s lawless policy at the southern border. He is merely the implementer and the symbol of President Biden’s dereliction, but he is still willfully failing to do his duty and thus a fit subject for impeachment.

 

On Wednesday, Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee launched a series of hearings that could end with the House approving articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. The secretary, of course, will never get convicted by the Democratic Senate.

 

Nonetheless, impeaching him would be an act of political and moral hygiene.

 

No more elegant testimony to the wide-ranging consequences of his failure could be made than that on the very day these hearings began, New York City closed James Madison High School in Brooklyn to its own students in order to make it a temporary home for 2,000 migrants until a bad storm passed.

 

Biden’s policies, as executed by Mayorkas, have created a crisis at the border and provided the incentive for the lawless and dangerous behavior we see on both sides of the border. By some estimates, since Biden took office there have been over 7.5 million enforcement encounters nationwide and over 6 million illegal crossings. Customs and Border Protection has seized more than 27,000 pounds of fentanyl just in fiscal year 2023. CBP reported a record number of encounters with illegal migrants at the border — over 300,000 — in December. Not even the prospect of an impending election against Donald “Build the Wall” Trump can induce the Biden administration to make the proper distinctions between citizens and aliens.

 

The administration’s core act of lawlessness is ignoring the fact that, under federal statute, illegal immigrants must be detained until they are removed or given asylum or some other relief is granted. There are legal complications and practical difficulties involved in doing this, but the Biden administration has demonstrated no interest in trying.

 

Its other ruinous policies, besides the original sin of ripping up the Trump policies that had been working, include twisted redefinitions and expansions of legal status, the incoherent extension of protected status to 700,000 Venezuelan migrants, and a deliberately neglectful policy of handing out meaningless court dates, sometimes a decade in advance, for asylum hearings that nobody expects to be held (and no illegal immigrant would be stupid enough to attend).

 

The policy of border-state governors and the Biden administration itself of busing and flying asylum seekers and migrants to their city of choice has alleviated the situation in border areas somewhat, only by spreading the mess nationwide. Blue-city mayors and blue-state governors, even knowing the political damage it could do to their party and their president, have been yelping for assistance and relief for months. New York City mayor Eric Adams is suing Texas for $700 million because the city’s policy of housing all migrants is costing the city billions. Chicago’s mayor is looking to dump migrants on neighboring suburbs. Tent cities are springing up across the California coastal cities. The sudden and unexpected surge in population is worsening a housing crisis in many cities.

 

Taken together, the Biden administration’s policies and inaction constitute a deliberate and wholesale abandonment of the executive branch’s job to enforce the law and provide the most basic security that any modern nation should expect from its government.

 

This kind of purposeful neglect of the duties of one’s office is precisely an offense for which impeachment is a constitutional remedy. Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas would draw more attention to the border crisis and perhaps create more pressure on the president to carry out the duties that the law and our constitutional system impose on him. If nothing else, it would be a strong statement of institutional disapproval by the House, which wrote and passed the laws that are being ignored, for the administration’s contemptible lawlessness at the border.