Yesterday, Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee held an impeachment hearing for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who’s been in his position since shortly after President Biden took office.
There was a lot of bluster and meaningless political phrases like “open borders,” but ultimately the GOP legislators couldn’t point to any single “high crime or misdemeanor” that Mayorkas had committed, or any particular shirking of duty, beyond a general dissatisfaction with Biden administration immigration policies. Such political disagreements are now, apparently, grounds for removal from office.
The same Republicans who are so concerned about supposed political interference in the department and Mayorkas’ unsubstantiated supposed refusal to follow laws seemed to have been perfectly fine with Donald Trump having two successive acting homeland security secretaries, leaving the department without a Senate-confirmed leader for nearly two years, with neither of the two actually serving lawfully.
Like much of Trump’s tenure, the specifics of this fiasco have been memory-holed in the broader cloud of scandal and mismanagement. To recap, then-Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan was named acting secretary after the April 2019 resignation of Kirstjen Nielsen, who changed the order of succession, probably at the White House’s behest, one day prior.
However, as the Government Accountability Office and several federal courts later ruled, the change did not technically allow McAleenan nor his successor Chad Wolf to serve in the role, and so both occupied this cabinet-level position without the legal authority to do so. This had tangible consequences for the government, including a court striking down Wolf’s attempt to end the DACA program because he was not legitimately in the position.
That Trump had a couple of toadies trying to implement his restrictionist agenda while unlawfully running one of the federal government’s largest departments for 21 months does not seem to have really bothered House Republicans much, because in the end, this isn’t about following the law.
This impeachment process is also not really about Mayorkas. The former U.S. attorney and Obama-era deputy secretary is a pretty standard-issue centrist Democrat who’s drawn as much fire from the left as from the right, in part due to his continued defense and enforcement of the Trump-era Title 42 expulsion program.
Little about the actual border enforcement panorama has changed since Trump was in office, with Biden making tweaks mainly on internal enforcement. When Title 42 expired, Biden replaced it with a new version of an earlier Trump asylum restriction. The migrants who are still making it in the country are largely doing so because they met the legal standard to begin an asylum application, to be litigated in the immigration courts.
When the president has tried to use the available tools for more orderly processing — including a humanitarian parole program for countries including Venezuela, whose plight Republicans often make a big show of caring about — GOP legislators have raked him over the coals for it.
What they really want is for there to be zero humanitarian immigration at all; they don’t want Biden and Mayorkas to actually perform their duties, but to openly flout them and jettison the country’s asylum statutes and international legal obligations.
Put plainly, this impeachment effort is not about ensuring government officials follow the law, but ensuring they break it.
