The House Homeland Security Committee kicked off an impeachment vote Tuesday against Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas with Republicans saying they are holding him to the same standards Democrats used in their impeachments of Donald Trump.
“Today is a grave day,” Chairman Mark Green said as he opened the proceedings. “We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer.”
“This is a terrible day for the committee,” countered Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, the top Democrat on the panel, who called the proceedings a “baseless” political attack.
Mr. Mayorkas faces two articles of impeachment. One accuses him of willfully subverting immigration laws passed by Congress in favor of his own preference for leniency for illegal immigrants. The other article accuses him of breach of public trust for obstructing and lying to Congress.
Democrats said those issues are policy differences that don’t rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, which is the wording used in the Constitution for impeachable offenses.
Mr. Green said he’s following “the precedent set by House Democrats” in their impeachments of Mr. Trump, in which they said a crime is not necessary for impeachment.
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Mr. Green pointed to Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who led one of the impeachments and who said “abuse of power was a well-understood offense” that deserved impeachment.
Republicans say that’s what Mr. Mayorkas did when he took laws pushing for illegal immigrants to be arrested and detained and wrote new “priorities,” urging officers to look for reasons not to detain or deport migrants, and when he left thousands of detention beds empty while releasing millions of illegal immigrants into the country.
“Secretary Mayorkas has put his political preferences above following the law,” Mr. Green said.