By Lisa Mascaro and Rebecca Santana | Associated Press
WASHINGTON — House Republicans are preparing to take a key vote Tuesday toward impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over what they call his “willful and systematic” refusal to enforce immigration laws as border security becomes a top 2024 election issue.
The Homeland Security Committee is pushing through a day-long hearing on two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, a rare charge against a Cabinet official unseen in nearly 150 years, as Republicans make GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s hard-line deportation approach to immigration their own.
“The actions and decisions of Secretary Mayorkas have left us with no other option but to proceed with articles of impeachment,” said Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn.
The articles charge that Mayorkas “willfully and systematically refused to comply with Federal immigration laws” amid a record surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and that he has “breached the public trust” in his claims to Congress that the border is secure. A committee vote would send the articles to the full House for a vote as soon as next week.
“We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer,” Green said.
With an unusual personal appeal Mayorkas wrote in a letter to the committee that it should be working with the Biden administration to update the nation’s “broken and outdated” immigration laws for the 21st century and an era of record global migration.
“We need a legislative solution and only Congress can provide it,” Mayorkas wrote in the pointed letter to the panel’s chairman.
Mayorkas never testified on his own behalf during the rushed impeachment proceedings — he and the committee couldn’t agree on a date — but drew on his own background as a child brought to the U.S. by his parents fleeing Cuba and on his career spent prosecuting criminals.
“Your false accusations do not rattle me and do not…
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