House Republicans ramp up calls to impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas

House Republicans calling to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas turned up the pressure on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday, with around 20 GOP members and three former Department of Homeland Security officials gathering for a press conference.

The calls to impeach Mayorkas come as McCarthy faces opposition from a handful of GOP members to his Speakership, threatening to derail his bid for the gavel.

“Now that we have the majority in the House of Representatives, I expect our party to pursue impeachment next Congress,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who is running as a protest challenger to McCarthy for Speaker and introduced articles of impeachment against Mayorkas last year.

“Secretary Mayorkas has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. His conduct is not incompetent. It is not negligent. It is willful and intentional,” Biggs said.

Though McCarthy has been highly critical of Mayorkas, he has declined to firmly commit to impeachment for any Biden officials, saying that he will not make impeachment a political exercise. That position aggravated Biggs, whose resolution to impeach Mayorkas now has 32 GOP co-sponsors.

After winning the House GOP nomination for Speaker last month over Biggs, McCarthy traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border and called on Mayorkas to resign or face GOP investigations and a possible impeachment inquiry.

That is not good enough for Biggs, who said in a Washington Examiner op-ed on Tuesday that McCarthy had added “a little thickener to weak sauce — but it’s not good enough.”

Biggs insinuated that McCarthy’s resignation call was a political move, telling reporters that McCarthy did so only “after he knew that he was facing somebody who was going to possibly deny him being Speaker.”

Some of the members at the press conference, though, are supportive of McCarthy for Speaker — including Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.), whom McCarthy appointed to the influential Republican Steering Committee, and Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), the incoming chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee.

“You’re going to see a lot of sentiment across the conference to have Mayorkas removed from that job and put somebody in to do the job and do it,” Hern told reporters. “Obviously it’s not going to happen instantaneously, but you have to point out that issues are out there.”

Republicans’ top driving argument for impeaching Mayorkas is that he has not kept “operational control” of the border as required by law.

When confronted by Republicans in congressional hearings, Mayorkas has maintained that the U.S. does have operational control of the country’s borders — a stance that has only further enraged critics and further fueled calls for impeachment, with Republicans accusing him of lying to Congress.

Republicans also accuse Mayorkas of improperly failing to detain migrants and improperly releasing migrants.

At the press conference, House Republicans were joined by three former Department of Homeland Security officials: cormer acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan, former acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan, and former U.S. Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott.

“He has served as this administration’s chief architect of their open border policies that we know has resulted in drugs pouring across our open borders, killing Americans every single day,” Morgan said of Mayorkas.