Recently, the House of Representatives formally initiated impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. This effort is not a political witch hunt or an election year stunt.
Rather, as the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, accurately declared after a recent visit to our lawless southern border, Secretary Mayorkas is “the greatest domestic threat to the national security and the safety of the American people.”
To one degree or another, every DHS secretary has failed to secure our borders and adequately enforce our immigration laws – two of the core missions of the department. Secretary Mayorkas hasn’t merely failed in that respect; he has deliberately sabotaged that mission. In carrying out his subversion of countless laws, he has repeatedly lied to and misled Congress and the American people, and done so under oath. Alejandro Mayorkas is, undeniably, in dereliction of his duty and in violation of his oath of office as secretary of Homeland Security and must be removed from that position.
With the seeming approval of President Joe Biden, Secretary Mayorkas has spearheaded an effort to undermine duly enacted statutes, (many of which, ironically, Mr. Biden voted for during his decades in the Senate) and replaced them with his own ideologically-driven policies. Moreover, he has done so at a time when the threats posed to the security of the United States are as great, or greater than they have ever been.
In recent months, top national security officials have issued overt warnings that the United States faces the threat of terror attacks on the scale of 9/11, or greater. “The reality is that the terrorism threat has been elevated throughout 2023, but the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before a Senate committee on Oct. 31, 2023. Two weeks later, he told a House Committee that since “October 7, we’ve seen a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations call for attacks against Americans and our allies.”
The threats against the security and well-being of the American people are not limited to radical Islamist groups funded, and often directed, by Iran. The United States faces economic and national security threats from other nations, most notably China, which — in the words of Director Wray — is engaged in “relentless efforts to steal our innovation and intellectual property, with around 2,000 active investigations across all 56 FBI field offices.”
These are but a few of the grave threats that DHS is tasked with deterring and preventing. Instead, Secretary Mayorkas doing precisely the opposite. Through a variety of deliberate policy decisions — canceling existing agreements with foreign governments aimed at curbing abuse of our asylum laws, wholesale release of migrants encountered at the border with little or no vetting, the creation of illegal parole programs and flat-out refusing to enforce numerous laws — he has encouraged mass illegal immigration. These unilateral decisions are not only overwhelming cities and states across the country, but have created the chaos at our borders that make it easy for our enemies to carry out the sort of acts that the FBI director warns about.
Among the 10 million or so people who have crossed our unsecured borders illegally since this administration came into office are 317 individuals on the terror watchlist who were encountered entering between ports of entry since fiscal year 2021. During the previous four fiscal years, only 14 such individuals were encountered.
Of course, we have no way of knowing how many national security threats were among the 1.7 million people who are known to have entered the country illegally in the past three years, but were not encountered by Customs and Border Protection. And even as China has stepped up its military and industrial espionage, Secretary Mayorkas has decreased the scrutiny given to Chinese nationals caught entering the United States illegally.
While our existing immigration laws are far from perfect, they are not the cause of the dangerous and unprecedented surge of illegal migration, as Mr. Mayorkas repeatedly claims. The sustained record levels of illegal immigration over which he has presided are a design feature of the policies he has implemented as secretary, in direct contravention to the laws he swore to uphold.
Impeaching public officials is not something that should ever be undertaken lightly. But in this case, the official in question has betrayed his oath of office and, as Chairman Green has correctly noted, every day that Secretary Mayorkas remains in that position, he poses a grave threat to the security of the nation.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) is Chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement.
Dan Stein is president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.