Homeland security chief Alejandro Mayorkas survives impeachment vote

The failed rebuke was led by hardline house Republicans who have been targeting Alejandro Mayorkas for months.

Rebel Republican Ken Buck after sinking the impeachment. Picture: AFP

Joe Biden’s immigration chief narrowly escaped impeachment over the US border crisis on Tuesday, in a party-line vote dismissed by Democrats as a political stunt ahead of a presidential election expected to feature immigration as a major issue.

The failed rebuke was led by hardline Republicans in the House of Representatives who have been targeting Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for months over a surge in illegal ­entries across the southern border.

Republicans had been sweating on what was expected to be a close vote, and so it proved – as three members of the party sided with Democrats in a vote that ended 216-214 in Mr Mayorkas’s favour.

Mr Mayorkas would have faced the prospect of a trial in the Senate, although he would have been acquitted by the Democrat-led upper chamber. The house, which had impeached only one other cabinet ­official in its history, secretary of war William Belknap in 1876, took a single vote on two articles accusing Mr Mayorkas of failure to enforce the law and of lying to congress.

Republicans have a narrow ­majority in the lower chamber and two conservatives jangled nerves in the leadership team as they announced their opposition to the impeachment ahead of the vote. They were joined by a surprise third dissenter as the vote played out, killing the impeachment drive.

“The failure of the Biden ­administration to rein in an open border is a national disgrace and will be a stain on his presidential legacy,” Colorado’s Ken Buck, one of the Republican rebels, wrote in an op-ed for congressional newspaper The Hill.

“However, the truth is that this is a policy disagreement masked as an impeachment.”

California’s Tom McClintock, another dissenter, released a 10-page memo accusing his party of failing to identify an impeachable “high crime or misdemeanor”.

The impeachment resolution accused Mr Mayorkas of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” on securing America’s borders and charged him with “breach of public trust”.

The vote came amid a showdown between the House and the Senate over curbing a surge in ­illegal immigration that led to a record 10,000 apprehensions a day at the border in December.

House Republicans have been accused of acting in bad faith over the Mayorkas impeachment after coming out against a bipartisan Senate deal that would impose the toughest asylum and border policies in decades.

The Republicans had initially pushed for the measures as a condition of providing aid for Ukraine. But a trickle of opposition to the bill turned into a major backlash as former president Donald Trump, who sees ­immigration as one of Mr Biden’s top vulnerabilities, warned his party to oppose it.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries accused Republicans of pandering to Mr Trump’s White House ambitions when they could be working to fix the “broken immigration system”. “Instead, what you have to offer the American people is this sham impeachment, this political stunt, this waste of time. But you will not fool the American people,” he said.

AFP