House gives Mayorkas a free pass

By Joe Guzzardi
Syndicated columnist

Even the lowest-hanging fruit is beyond the hapless Grand Old Party’s reach. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment, a ripe peach waiting to be picked, never happened.

Since prior to the 2022 mid-term elections in which the GOP dramatically underperformed, Republican legislators have promised to restore border security which, under Mayorkas’ criminal, anti-constitutional, impeachable refusal to enforce immigration law, has devolved into chaos. 

At the time that then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy released the Commitment to America, Mayorkas had allowed 3.8 million illegal aliens to cross, and 900,000 gotaways to escape into the interior. In all, foreign nationals from more than 160 nations had been processed and released. There are 195 countries in the world.

On and on continues the invasion. Over the past 12 months, Customs and Border Protection has encountered 3.2 million illegal aliens, and the gotaway total has likely doubled. A closer look at the 2023 statistics reveal more criminal disregard for Americans’ safety and security. In FY 2023, CBP caught 52,000 Chinese nationals. China is America’s greatest threat, according to the FBI director and others. CBP also encountered a record-high number of aliens who appear on the FBI’s suspected terrorist watch list: 172. Of this number, 169 were attempting to evade capture at the southern border, and three were apprehended trying to sneak in through the increasingly porous northern border.

The DHS guideline for a secretary’s competency is whether his agency has “operational control” of the border. Operational Control, as defined in the 2006 Secure Fence Act, Section 2 (b), mandates that the secretary “achieves and maintains” operational control which means “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.” 

The statistics cited above, and thousands of online and nationally broadcast videos, prove that unlawful entries have flourished since President Biden’s inauguration, January 20, 2021. Because aliens keep arriving, and continuously accessing costly affirmative benefits like medical care, education, housing and transportation, pinpointing the precise cost to citizen taxpayers is impossible. The House Committee on Homeland Security provided a dollar-cost range. But what a staggering range it is – from $150 billion to $451 billion annually.

Before Congress left on its Thanksgiving recess, the GOP had a golden opportunity to impeach Mayorkas, but it punted. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) brought Articles of Impeachment against Mayorkas to the House floor as a privileged resolution which means that members would vote on it within 48 hours. But eight Republicans joined with Democrats to vote 209-201 to send Greene’s resolution to the House graveyard for possible consideration at some undefined future time.

Mayorkas gets off, free to keep the status quo of wide-open borders alive and well. The eight who joined with Democrats are Colorado’s Ken Buck, North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx and Patrick McHenry, Oregon’s Cliff Bentz, Ohio’s Mike Turner, and California’s Darrell Issa, John Duarte and Tom McClintock. Colorado, North Carolina, Oregon, Ohio and certainly California have felt the fiscal burden of Mayorkas’ criminal neglect. All except Duarte have strong pro-enforcement voting records, but on the Mayorkas matter, they chose to join the other side.

The most curious nay vote was from McClintock, the influential Chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee. If the GOP can’t count on high-ranking officials like McClintock to support the overdue Mayorkas impeachment effort, then border security is a fantasy. McClintock’s defense of his vote overlooked the national crisis that Mayorkas has encouraged and enabled.

While McClintock acknowledged that Mayorkas had opened the border to drugs, terrorists and criminals, he concluded that those crimes represent policy disputes and didn’t rise to impeachment level. Then, traveling far afield from Mayorkas’ malfeasance, McClintock said the Republicans must not “allow the left to become our teachers,” a reference to the Democrats’ two unsuccessful impeachment attempts made on President Donald Trump. In McClintock’s view, drugs, terrorists and criminals are okay, but the sanctity of the House impeachment process is more important than protecting the homeland.

Even though the Senate would never have upheld a House vote to impeach, the opportunity missed was huge. Impeaching Mayorkas would show that the Republicans are serious about protecting Americans from the danger that unvetted migrants represent. A related takeaway from a successful Mayorkas impeachment would be that the GOP also has its eye on the soaring costs of funding illegal immigration, a concern that taxpaying Americans share.

The most devastating outcome: shelving Mayorkas’ impeachment means that, over the coming months, hundreds of thousands of aliens will be processed and released into the interior – not an exaggeration. 

In South Texas, to select one example among many, border officials reported encountering 1,200 migrants daily, exposing the treasonous handiwork of Mayorkas. By the time Inauguration Day 2025 arrives, likely more than 8 million people from locations across the globe will have been released into the general population in cities and towns across the U.S.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has been writing about immigration for more than 30 years.