House Republicans Impeach Mayorkas for Border Policies

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives voted narrowly on Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a precedent-shattering vote that charged him with willfully refusing to enforce border laws and breaching the public trust.

In a 214-213 vote, Republicans barreled past the solid opposition of Democrats and reservations in their own ranks to make Mayorkas the first sitting Cabinet secretary in U.S. history to be impeached.

It amounted to a partisan indictment of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies by the GOP, which is seeking to use a surge in migration across the United States border with Mexico during his tenure as a political weapon against him and Democrats in this year’s elections.

Biden condemned the House’s vote in a statement Tuesday night.

“History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” he said.

The vote came a week after the House rejected the charges against Mayorkas when Republicans, who control the House by a razor-thin margin, tried and failed to muster a majority to approve them.

It put Mayorkas in the company of past presidents and administration officials who have been impeached on allegations of personal corruption and other wrongdoing. But the charges against him broke with history by failing to identify any such offense, instead effectively declaring the policy choices Mayorkas has carried out a constitutional crime. The approach threatened to lower the bar for impeachments — which already has fallen in recent years — reducing what was once Congress’ most potent tool to remove despots from power to a weapon to be deployed in political fights.

Democrats, former secretaries of homeland security, the country’s largest police union and a chorus of constitutional law experts — including conservatives — have denounced the impeachment as a blatant attempt to resolve a policy dispute with a constitutional punishment. They said Republicans had presented no evidence that Mayorkas’ conduct rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Three Republicans — Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California — lined up with Democrats against the resolution. They warned that impeaching a Cabinet secretary for the way he did his job would weaken a weighty constitutional penalty and do nothing to address serious immigration issues.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .