House GOP releases impeachment articles in bid to oust Homeland Security's Mayorkas

Updated January 28, 2024 at 11:21 AM ET

The House Committee on Homeland Security on Sunday released draft articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

In its 20-page resolution, the Republican-led committee accuses Mayorkas of high crimes and misdemeanors, including "willfully" disregarding immigration law.

The two articles accuse Mayorkas of "willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law" for failing to manage the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border and "breach of public trust."

Democrats on the committee and DHS are calling the articles a "sham."

Ranking member Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., accused Republicans of abusing their impeachment power to "score political points."

"Republicans don't actually want to work towards bipartisan solutions to fix the border – in fact, they have repeatedly sabotaged the Secretary's efforts to secure the border and denied DHS' funding requests," Thompson said in a statement. "Secretary Mayorkas is upholding the law and honoring the public trust as he has throughout his more than 30 years of service to our Nation."

DHS responded Sunday with a memo that called Republicans' effort "a distraction from other vital national security priorities and the work Congress should be doing to actually fix our broken immigration laws."

"They don't want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That's why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas," the memo read.

The committee plans to meet on Tuesday at 10 a.m. to mark up the articles and then could vote sometime time after that. If the articles pass the committee, they then go to the full House for an impeachment vote. It would then be up to the Democratic-led Senate on whether to convict. [Copyright 2024 NPR]