Two Things About The Impeachment of Gus Mayorkas

Photo by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The House Homeland Security Committee has released its articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Gus Mayorkas.  You can read them here. Going over them I’m struck by two things.

First, the Secretary is accused of willfully and systematically refusing to comply with immigration law, most notably by both allowing undocumented migrants to be paroled enmasse if they are from certain countries, and for directing the CBP and ICE to look at the person’s whole case before detaining and removing, not just any single decision.  The allegation is that these people have been turned loose in the US, never to be seen again.  Which is horse feathers.

According to the American Immigration Council:

• 83% of nondetained immigrants with completed or pending removal cases attended all of their hearings.
• 96% of nondetained immigrants represented by a lawyer attended all of their hearings.
• 15% of those who were ordered deported because they did not appear in court successfully reopened their cases and had their removal orders rescinded. In some years, as many as 20% of all orders of removal for missing court were later overturned.
• Individuals who apply for relief from removal have especially high rates of appearance.
• Appearance rates vary strongly based on the immigration court’s location.

Now that sounds bad but consider that criminal courts across the US have Failure to Appear Rates of 15%-30% for people on bail.  Call me nuts, but if these numbers represent migrant appear at higher rates then domestic criminals, and all migrants appear at the same rates, then the Secretary’s parole program seems to be statistically effective.  Interestingly, one of the groups that is dinged for being paroled are Afghans admitted after the US withdrawal.  Apparently, Republicans don’t want to help the people they ding Joe Biden for “abandoning.” There’s also the minorly inconvenient fact that SCOTUS ruled twice in 2023 that the President – and by extension his cabinet secretaries – have discretion in how the enforce immigration laws.

The other thing this article misses – which I hope the democrats on the committee go after – is whether DHS has the funding (and in the right places in its budget) to actually detain everyone the Committee thinks should be detained.  Impeaching a guy for following the letter of the fiscal law Congress sets with its appropriations (or doesn’t as is the case this year) is cowardly.

The second article says the Secretary should be impeached and removed for violating the public trust, specifically for lying to Congress about terms like “Operational control” or “secure.”  Essentially, because the Secretary believes something different then the Committee, and uses language they don’t like. Frankly if we were going to impeach cabinet secretaries for this sort of “lying” we’d have a multi decade backlog of cases to try.

I know full well that there are border problems.  So does Secretary Mayorkas.  So does Joe Biden. But as was recently pointed out by my fellow OT author David Thornton, the GOP isn’t serious about doing anything to address the situation.  This Kabuki theatre dance of impeachment is more of the same.  Luckily for the GOP, the media will take it seriously, so their cowardly obstruction can remain hidden.