House GOP Races Toward Mayorkas Impeachment With Call to Testify

House Republicans are calling on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to testify later this month in fast-moving impeachment proceedings.

Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) invited the secretary to appear Jan. 18 before the Homeland Security Committee, saying he was giving Mayorkas “one more opportunity to explain his actions” on US border policies. The date, less than two weeks away, is a signal of how quickly the panel is working to approve impeachment articles and tee up a vote on the House floor.

“As the Department’s Secretary, your testimony is vital to the Committee’s oversight and to providing the American public with complete transparency and accountability,” Green said Friday in a letter first obtained by Bloomberg Government.

The panel is holding at least two Mayorkas-focused hearings this month — the first on Jan. 10 — and then marking up impeachment articles, Green announced last month. Republicans have criticized the secretary’s handling of the US-Mexico border amid record high migrant encounters during much of President Joe Biden’s tenure, and Green’s panel released a series of reports investigating Mayorkas’ role.

The targeting of Mayorkas is part of a broader effort to use turmoil at the US-Mexico border as a political cudgel against Biden in the lead-up to the November elections. Biden administration officials and allies on Capitol Hill have derided the GOP effort as a political stunt based on policy disagreements that don’t meet the constitutional standard for impeachment.

“It was never meant to be a legitimate investigation — only a MAGA spectacle,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the homeland panel’s top Democrat, said last week.

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Green complained Friday that Mayorkas declined invitations to testify in a border-specific hearing last fall.

“However, I promised from the start of our investigation that the Committee would conduct this process thoroughly and fairly, and to that end, we are giving Secretary Mayorkas one more opportunity to explain his actions and decisions to Congress and to the American people,” Green said in a statement.

Mayorkas last appeared before the Homeland Security Committee in November in an annual hearing on threats to the US.

Mayorkas would be the first Cabinet secretary impeached in almost 150 years.