by Madeleine Hubbard
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday issued a fiery defense against the impeachment articles he faces, calling the allegations “false” and urging Congress to fix the U.S. immigration system through legislation.
On the same day that the House Homeland Security Committee is scheduled to mark up the articles before sending them to the House for a vote, Mayorkas, who has not testified before the committee, responded to the articles in a letter Tuesday to Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn.
“I assure you that your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me from the law enforcement and broader public service mission to which I have devoted most of my career and to which I remain devoted,” Mayorkas wrote in what is the first time he has directly responded to the chairman regarding the impeachment effort, according to Punchbowl News.
Mayoraks said he did agree to testify before the committee on the impeachment inquiry, but the panel never responded to him.
“Our immigration laws were simply not built for 21st century migration patterns,” he also said, citing various causes of mass migration, which he says is then “facilitated by human smuggling organizations that exploit migrants as part of a billion-dollar criminal enterprise.”
The secretary said: “We need a legislative solution and only Congress can provide it,” by allocating funding to hire more law enforcement personnel and purchase additional equipment to use at the border.
“Instead, you claim that we have failed to enforce our immigration laws. That is false,” Mayorkas also wrote. “We have provided Congress and your Committee hours of testimony, thousands of documents, hundreds of briefings, and much more information that demonstrates quite clearly how we are enforcing the law.”
The two impeachment articles accuse Mayorkas of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust.” The effort comes amid record levels of illegal immigration.
A vote to impeach the secretary may occur before the end of this week. Mayorkas may become the first Cabinet official to be impeached in nearly 150 years, although he is unlikely to be removed from office, as it would require a two-thirds vote from the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Green responded to Mayorkas’ letter hours later, calling his same-day defense “inadequate and unbecoming of a Cabinet secretary.”
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