House committee chair lays out a battle plan against Biden’s top border official
Hudson Crozier
Republicans, for good reason, have pursued the possibility of impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for months for his handling of illegal immigration. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) claims to have the evidence to take him down.
“He has totally disregarded the entire foundation of our government,” Green said at a Heritage Foundation event yesterday. He argued that Mayorkas has made the Department of Homeland Security unaccountable to Congress and, therefore, the public, through his insistence on lenient border policy.
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Green highlighted several problems with the historic rates of illegal border crossings under Mayorkas’s watch. An especially disturbing feature is the drastic increase in the number of “gotaways,” which topped 1.5 million in May.
“Think about who’s in that gotaway population,” Green said, emphasizing encounters with people on the FBI’s terror watchlist or reportedly tied to the Chinese government.
The Homeland Security Committee will release a report focused on Mayorkas’s “dereliction of duty” next week, Green explained. But establishing the negligence of his mass parole and asylum programs will only be the beginning. Green said the committee is moving on to explore how our “open border has facilitated” Mexican cartel crime, especially fentanyl trafficking into the United States.
A third stage of the investigation will assess the “human cost” of the border crisis, which will involve hearing from families who have “lost people,” Green said. Topics of the testimony will include Border Patrol suicides and crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Green also said that former DHS agent Tim Ballard will likely take the stand to discuss how the government’s processing of unaccompanied minors at the border has enabled child trafficking. This is an issue Green seeks to address with legislation in the future.
A fourth stage will assess financial costs such as taxpayer-funded healthcare for overwhelming numbers of illegal immigrants. Green argued that it violates federal law not to require asylum seekers to pay their own expenses.
Lastly, Green’s investigation will rely on disclosures from government insiders on potential “fraud” committed by Mayorkas. Green said these people are “not whistleblowers yet” and has not elaborated on the allegations.
In total, the investigation will prove that Mayorkas lied to Congress, broke ten laws, and violated court orders to advance his pro-illegal immigration methods, Green claims.
Green hopes that the committee’s patient, “methodical” approach “educates the American people” and his colleagues on the severity of Biden’s border disaster. “I hope they realize that this has been intentional from the beginning,” he charged.
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Green told his audience that conservatives’ efforts to secure the border are “a continuing fight that takes resolve.” While it’s disgraceful that lawmakers have to “fight” the executive branch on such a fundamental task, let’s hope they are successful.
Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.