House GOP Pushes Ahead With Mayorkas Impeachment

"The actions and decisions of Secretary Mayorkas have left us with no other option but to proceed with articles of impeachment," Republican Rep. Mark Green said Tuesday at the start of a daylong hearing on sending the articles detailed Sunday to the full House. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas didn't speak at the House Homeland Security Committee hearing, but he sent Green, the committee's chairman, a letter pushing back against the allegations, the Washington Post reports. "I assure you that your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me from the law enforcement and broader public service to which I remain devoted," Mayorkas wrote.

House Republicans accuse Mayorkas of failing to enforce the law at the border and of breaching the public trust by making false statements and blocking oversight of the DHS. "We have provided Congress and your Committee hours of testimony, thousands of documents, hundreds of briefings, and much more information that demonstrates quite clearly how we are enforcing the law," Mayorkas said in his letter to Green, per the Post. Mayorkas, who has been working with the Senate on a bipartisan border deal, said the House committee should be working with the Biden administration to fix the country's "broken and outdated" immigration system, the AP reports.

If the panel sends the charges to the full House, it will require a near-unanimous vote from Republicans to send it to the Senate. There is little chance of Mayorkas being convicted in that chamber, but the move will "force an election-year trial" in which Republicans will have the chance to criticize the Biden administration's border policies, the New York Times notes. Democrats called Tuesday's hearing a political stunt. It's "a terrible day for the committee, the United States, the Constitution, and our great country," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, the panel's ranking Democrat. (More Alejandro Mayorkas stories.)