Homeland chief shrugs off Cruz impeachment threat, decries ‘open border’ rhetoric

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas shrugged off calls Friday for his impeachment by Sen. Ted Cruz and others, accusing critics of encouraging the illegal migration they say they condemn every time they say the border is open. Cruz and others says Mayorkas should be impeached for failing to control the border, resulting in record levels of illegal immigration and spikes in smuggling of fentanyl and other contraband. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, and I intend to continue to do it. That’s my response,” he said, during a meeting with The Dallas Morning News editorial board.

He added that “the political cry that the border is open” — a common refrain from GOP critics — “is music to the smugglers’ ears, because they take that political rhetoric and they market it” to desperate migrants from Venezuela and other countries. In an Oct. 6 letter, Cruz and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Mayorkas that “your failure to faithfully enforce this nation’s immigration laws and willful blindness to the very real humanitarian crisis at our southern border amounts to a gross dereliction of duty and a violation of your oath of office” that “could provide grounds for impeachment.” The senators cited “shocking statistics” on Mayorkas’s watch, including spikes in drug seizures, and more than 2.1 million encounters with undocumented migrants at the southern border in the last 12 months, topping a record 1.7 million set the previous fiscal year. Mayorkas pointed out that the vast majority of drug smuggling takes place at ports of entry. Only one cabinet official has ever been impeached, and he was acquitted. William Belknap, the secretary of war under President Ulysses S. Grant and a former Civil War general, was impeached on corruption charges minutes after resigning in 1876.