House Homeland Security Committee Chairman on Mayorkas Impeachment: “Yes, We Have the Votes”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 21, 2024) — In an interview today with Maria Bartiromo of “Sunday Morning Futures,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN7) said he is confident the greater House will vote to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in the coming weeks.

Green’s remarks begin at the 15:54 mark here.

The House is will convene January 29, Bartiromo said. According to CNN last week, the committee will vote on Mayorkas’s impeachment on Wednesday, January 31. 

“Right now we are assembling Articles of Impeachment to present to our committee,” Green told Bartiromo of the process as he expects it to unfold. “We’ll mark those up in committee very shortly after getting back and then, passing the committee, they’ll go to a vote on the floor…I anticipate a very quick vote on the floor.”

“Do you feel you have the votes to impeach Mayorkas?” Bartiromo asked.

“Yes, we have the votes,” Green answered, although he said some House Democrats continue to believe Mayorkas “should be fired” rather than removed from office.

The ranking member of the committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS2), who chaired the January 6 “Select Committee,” responded to an initial Mayorkas impeachment hearing by stating, “You cannot impeach a Cabinet secretary because you don’t like a president’s policies,” calling it a “political stunt.” “This is not a legitimate impeachment,” Thompson added.

Expounding on his belief that Mayorkas should be ousted, Green accused him of “do[ing] whatever he wants” and failing to “detain” illegal aliens in accordance with the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). 

“It’s about the Constitution, Maria; it’s about the founding principles of our country: separation of power,” Green said.

Mayorkas has long been criticized by congressional Republicans for allowing an “unprecedented” influx of “migrants” across the U.S.-Mexico border over nearly three years, placing strain on not only border states, but also states and communities to which the aliens are bused or flown at taxpayer expense.

According to The Washington Post on January 6 citing a DHS report, “more than 2.3 million migrants” have been released into the interior of the country since Biden took office. Often sourced to “Politifact,” which is owned by The Poynter Institute, mainstream media outlets have pushed back against Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis’s claims that “8 million” illegal aliens have entered and remained in the U.S. since Biden was inaugurated.

[Editor’s Note: As this story went to press, DeSantis suspended his campaign and endorsed 45th President and 2024 presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.]

Nominated by Joe Biden soon after his inauguration, Mayorkas was sworn in as DHS secretary on February 2, 2021. “A political refugee born in Havana, Cuba, Mayorkas is the first Latino and immigrant confirmed to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security,” his biography states. “He has led a distinguished 30-year career as a law enforcement official and a nationally recognized lawyer in the private sector. Mayorkas served as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2013 to 2016, and as the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2009 to 2013. During his tenure at DHS, he led the development and implementation of DACA, negotiated cybersecurity and homeland security agreements with foreign governments, led the Department’s response to Ebola and Zika, helped build and administer the Blue Campaign to combat human trafficking, and developed an emergency relief program for orphaned youth following the tragic January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Mayorkas also created the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate to better ensure the integrity of the legal immigration system.”

In a sharp about-face as compared to his previous statements, on Friday Biden admitted the border is not secure. His remark came two days after 14 Democrat congressmen voted with Republicans in favor of a non-binding resolution “Denouncing the Biden administration’s open-borders policies, condemning the national security and public safety crisis along the southwest border, and urging President Biden to end his administration’s open-borders policies.”

According to the resolution, the Biden regime has released “at least 3.3 million” “illegal aliens,” a term DHS has outlawed, “into the interior of the United States.”

Multple Efforts to Impeach Since 2021

On August 10, 2021, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ4) filed HR 582, a resolution calling for the impeachment of Mayorkas, “for high crimes and misdemeanors.”

On January 10, 2023, Rep. Pat Fallon filed a resolution accusing Mayorkas of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

In June 2023, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA3) filed Articles of Impeachment, but House support on the issue remained insufficient.

Higgins’s resolution claimed “Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas, in his conduct as Secretary of Homeland Security, has engaged in a pattern of conduct that directly violates his constitutional oath as an executive officer of the United States in the following manner…

“He has failed, beyond a reasonable doubt, to uphold this oath and to protect the
American people as required by law. 

“Specifically, Secretary Mayorkas has intentionally used his position as Secretary of Homeland Security to dismantle previously successful border security resources,
enforcement, and policies forcing border and interior enforcement agents to deprioritize their primary law enforcement mission.”

An October 2023 report by the House Judiciary Committee declared that “New data and information obtained by the Committee on the Judiciary and its Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement reveal that the Biden Administration has failed to remove, through immigration court removal proceedings, over 99 percent of those illegal aliens who have been released into the country under President Joe Biden. This information contradicts the assertions of the Administration, and the statements of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, that the southwest border is closed and illegal aliens are removed from the country quickly.”

On November 9, 2023, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA14) introduced Privileged Articles of Impeachment against Mayorkas citing “high crimes and misdemeanors”; the resolution failed five days later in favor of a referral of her complaint to the Homeland Security Committee.

At the time, USAToday reported, “However, calls to impeach Mayorkas died down following the opening of House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. The defeat of Greene’s resolution highlights how House Republicans have zeroed in on impeaching the president rather than his Cabinet members.”

On January 10, 2024, the House Homeland Security Committee held its initial hearing on Mayorkas’s impeachment.

On January 18, Green’s committee held a second, public hearing during which the mothers of two deceased young women declared Mayorkas culpable in their daughters’ deaths, one from a Fentanyl overdose and the other, an autistic woman who had just celebrated her 20th birthday, through a kidnapping and murder at the hands of a 17-year-old illegal alien and member of the barbaric MS-13 cartel.

The same day, the House Judiciary Committee released a ten-page report titled, “NEW DATA REVEAL WORSENING MAGNITUDE OF THE BIDEN BORDER CRISIS AND LACK OF INTERIOR IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT.”

That report begins:

Three years into the Biden Administration, the crisis at the southwest border is worse
than ever. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered a record-breaking 269,735 illegal aliens along the southwest border in September 2023, shattering the previous record of 252,315 encounters in December 2022.¹ Although official figures are not yet known, the September 2023 record reportedly stood for just three months—December 2023 saw more than 302,000 illegal alien encounters along the southwest border.² With such a large and seemingly unending influx of illegal aliens into the United States, Americans would be right to conclude that the border crisis is not a side effect, but instead a goal, of the Biden Administration’s radical open-borders immigration policies.

Far from disincentivizing the flood of illegal immigration by detaining and removing
illegal aliens, President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary
Alejandro Mayorkas continue to release illegal aliens into U.S. communities en masse. In fact, in early December 2023, DHS officials admitted that “an average of 5,000 illegal aliens are currently being released into the U.S. each day at the border.”³ Even Secretary Mayorkas has acknowledged the high rate of releases, telling Border Patrol “that the current rate of release for illegal immigrants apprehended at the southern border is ‘above 85 [percent].’”⁴

In late July, Mayorkas testified to the House Judiciary Committee but did not appear for the January 18 Homeland Security Committee hearing, citing a scheduling conflict.

Constitutionally, a majority House vote in favor of impeachment would not result in Mayorkas’s removal from office unless and until the Senate convicted him following trial.