While House Republicans only just succeeded Tuesday in their effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, they have been investigating his handling of the border since they reclaimed the House majority in 2022.
Momentum to plot a swift impeachment of Mayorkas picked up steam last month as key swing-district Republicans expressed openness to the idea amid a recent surge of migrant crossings at the southern border.
Border authorities encountered more than 225,000 migrants along the US-Mexico border in December, marking the highest monthly total recorded since 2000, according to preliminary Homeland Security statistics shared with CNN. And in fiscal year 2022, according to the Department of Homeland Security, 1.4 million individuals who were encountered at the border were removed, which is more than in any previous year.
The border crisis has galvanized Republicans, unifying their party for more aggressive action on an issue central to the 2024 campaign, and a handful of the eight Republicans who voted with Democrats to scuttle an effort to impeach Mayorkas in November 2023 recently signaled they’d back impeaching him if it went through the committee process, which happened late last month.
Moderate Republicans, including ones in districts that President Joe Biden carried in 2020, also signaled more willingness to impeach Mayorkas than the president – a sign of the shifting political terrain on the issue.
While House Republicans have sought to use Mayorkas’ impeachment to address their issues with Biden’s handling of the border, the GOP also helped to tank – along with Donald Trump – a major bipartisan border deal and foreign aid package that would have marked a tough change to immigration law championed by one of the Senate’s most conservative members. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the bill would be dead on arrival in his chamber, even if it ever made it out of the Senate.
Mayorkas wrote in a letter in advance of the vote that “the problems with our broken and outdated immigration system are not new” and called on Congress to help provide a legislative solution to the “historically divisive issue.”
CNN’s Melanie Zanona, Manu Raju and Annie Grayer contributed to this report.
