Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, is the first cabinet member to be impeached in almost 150 years after the House of Representatives narrowly decided to do so.
Mayorkas is held accountable by many Republicans for the extraordinary number of migrants at the US-Mexico border. The measure was approved by the Republican-led chamber 214 to 213 votes, following the previous attempt’s failure last week. Mayorkas’s opponents claimed that by not doing more to fortify the border, he was betraying his pledge to “well and faithfully discharge the duties” of his office.
Now that it is in the Democratic-led Senate, the matter is probably doomed to fail. The vote was referred to as a “political stunt” and a “blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship” by President Joe Biden on Tuesday.
The vote was mainly split along party lines, with three Republican representatives—Tom McClintock of California, Ken Buck of Colorado, and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin—and 210 Democrats voting against the impeachment.
The three defectors also voted against Mayorkas’s initial impeachment attempt, arguing that weakening the constitutional penalty and doing little to address the border crisis woul result from impeaching someone who had not committed a serious crime.
Prior to the November election, immigration is a divisive and politically contentious issue because more than 6.3 million migrants have entered the US illegally since 2021. One of the main focuses of Donald Trump’s effort to remove Joe Biden from office is migrants’ issue.
