Two top Republican senators put Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on notice that Congress has grounds to impeach him unless he acts to reverse his “gross dereliction of duty” at the southern border, according to a report on Thursday.
Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas sent the DHS secretary a letter saying that they have compiled data showing that since he took office 19 months ago, there have been more than 4.4 million illegal crossings, more than 3.5 million apprehensions by US border officials and at least 900,000 so-called “gotaways” — migrants who evaded arrest.
“This is gross dereliction of duty and, if not corrected swiftly, could provide grounds for impeachment,” Graham and Cruz write in the letter, obtained by Fox News Digital.
“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,” added the letter, sent Tuesday.
The two Republicans also said that “despite the heroic efforts” of officials with the US Border Patrol, the Biden administration has provided them with “little support” and “you have failed to achieve any semblance of operational control of the southern border.”
Graham and Cruz blame the crisis on President Biden’s rolling back many of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, including the Remain in Mexico program for asylum-seekers and ending contracts to build the border wall.
As a result, they say that the numbers of illegal immigration under the Biden administration “stand in stark contract” to the levels when Trump was in office, noting a “930% increase” in encounters with “illegal aliens” from May 2020 to May 2022.
Along with the illegal immigration crisis, the senators accused Mayorkas’ lax leadership of allowing Mexican cartels working in cahoots with Chinese suppliers to smuggle drugs into the US, creating the “fentanyl-fueled opioid epidemic” that killed more than 100,000 Americans last year.
”This lucrative illicit enterprise continues to thrive – while Americans die – all because DHS has ceded control of our southern border to the cartels for political gain,” the letter says.
The “chaos” along the border also presents a “prime opportunity for terrorists to enter the United States undetected,” Graham and Cruz go on, pointing out that the Border Patrol has nabbed at least 78 people in the federal Terrorist Screening Database in fiscal year 2022 — “more than twice as many apprehended in the past five fiscal years combined.”
“Terrorists likely have noticed that our southern border is unsecured and are seeking to take advantage of it, if they haven’t already,” Graham and Cruz say.
”It is only a matter of time until we will see an attack on American soil from such terrorists,” they continue.
The Republicans noted that members of Congress have sent letters to DHS to try to learn “why this crisis has gone on unaddressed” since the beginning of the Biden administration.
But they said public statements made by members of the administration, including Vice President Kamala Harris, show that the White House fails to “truly understand the scope of this crisis or even acknowledge its existence” and have even gone as far as to proclaim the “border is secure.”
“Vice President Harris apparently shares this same delusion,” the letter says, referring to her insistence that the border was “secure” last month on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
In anticipation that they will win back control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, Republicans in the House filed a resolution in August to impeach Mayorkas.
The resolution, introduced by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and co-sponsored by 31 of his fellow GOPers, said that Mayorkas should be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors” over his handling of the border crisis.