A committee from the U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday morning to advance articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his failure to secure the border.
The advancement comes after two impeachment articles were released by House Republicans on Sunday, making multiple allegations against Mayorkas regarding the ongoing crisis at the southern border, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The House Homeland Security Committee spent more than 10 hours discussing the two impeachment articles before voting 18-15 along party lines to advance the process, per ABC News.
The meeting was contentious at times as Republicans and Democrats on the Committee debated the language within the impeachment articles, with extended focus being placed on what could be considered a “misdemeanor.”
Committee Republicans claimed that the language used in the Constitution likely had different meaning at the time, arguing that a “misdemeanor” may have meant the act of demeaning oneself, per CBS News.
Democrats argued against these claims, prompting Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) to criticize the articles and say that you cannot impeach an official because “you think they’re doing a bad job.”
“If that becomes the new precedent, then the floodgates will open and you will have frivolous impeachments from here until the end of time,” he said, per CBS.
The next step is for the articles to go to the full House of Representatives, where lawmakers are expected to discuss and vote on the impeachment next week.
House Homeland Security chair Mark Green (R-TN) reportedly held a closed-door meeting on Monday night with senior Republicans to discuss the impeachment articles. Green told CNN following the meeting that “nobody had any questions or dissent” about the allegations brought forth.
The first of the articles of impeachment alleges that Mayorkas participated in a “catch and release scheme” that allowed unlawful migrants to enter the U.S. without a plan to ensure they appear before an immigration court in the future.
The second of these articles claims that Mayorkas lied to Congress when stating that DHS has “operational control” of the border, adding that the secretary told lawmakers that it was “secure” and “closed.”
Green said prior to this vote that the impeachment articles “lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment.”
“He has willfully and systemically refused to comply with immigration laws enacted by Congress. He has breached the public trust by knowingly making false statements to Congress and the American people, and obstructing congressional oversight of his department,” he said in a statement sent to CNN.
Mayorkas has pushed back on these claims, writing in a letter to Green that DHS has “provided Congress and your Committee hours of testimony, thousands of documents, hundreds of briefings, and much more information that demonstrates quite clearly how we are enforcing the law.”
“I assure you that your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me from the law enforcement and broader public service to which I remain devoted,” wrote Mayorkas, per The Washington Post.
