The House impeached the DHS secretary. What’s next for Alejandro Mayorkas?

The House impeached the DHS secretary. What’s next for Alejandro Mayorkas?

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas became the first sitting Cabinet secretary to be impeached Tuesday — with House Republicans succeeding in the public rebuke of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. The impeachment passed by a single vote.

It was House Republicans’ second attempt to impeach Mayorkas, after a similar vote narrowly failed last week. Democrats and some scholars have voiced concern about impeachment — the most serious tool the U.S. Constitution provides to rein in a public official — being used as a partisan weapon.

Here’s what to know about what happened, and what’s next for Mayorkas.

House Republicans impeach Alejandro Mayorkas by a single vote

What does it mean to impeach a Cabinet member?

Moves to impeach Cabinet members are extremely rare: The last took place almost 150 years ago, when William Belknap — the secretary of war for President Ulysses S. Grant — resigned just before he was impeached on corruption charges.

On Tuesday, House Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas on counts of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust” related to his handling of immigration and security at the U.S.-Mexico border. All Democrats present opposed the move — together with Republican Reps. Mike Gallagher (Wis.), Ken Buck (Colo.) and Tom McClintock (Calif.), who also voted against last week’s attempt, saying the case doesn’t meet the bar for impeachment.

What happens now for Mayorkas?

Despite the impeachment vote, Mayorkas still has his position. All eyes will be on the Senate, which will consider whether to convict Mayorkas and oust him.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that the appointed House Republican impeachment managers will present the articles to the Senate when senators return to Washington at the end of the month. Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray (D-Wash.) will preside over a trial, Schumer’s office said.

There is a higher bar to convict Mayorkas than there was to impeach him. Two-thirds of the Democratic-controlled Senate must vote to convict him. Given the challenges House Republicans had impeaching Mayorkas, this makes conviction in the upper house a longer shot.

Meanwhile, “I’m doing my work,” Mayorkas said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this month, adding that he was “making sure it doesn’t distract me from it.”

Back to the wall, Alejandro Mayorkas tries to build a border legacy

What have Republicans and Democrats said about impeachment?

House Republicans argue that impeachment — and ultimately, conviction — is a necessary course of action because, in their view, Mayorkas has failed to enforce U.S. immigration policies and this has led to the surge of illegal border crossings. Republicans cite a 2006 law that requires the Homeland Security secretary to maintain “operational control” over the border.

While there were more than 250,000 arrests for illegal crossings at the United States’ southern border in December — a record high — administration officials and preliminary data this month indicated that the figure for January dropped to around 150,000, The Post reported.

Democrats have accused House Republicans of using impeachment as a political tool ahead of the November election. “History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” President Biden said in a statement after Tuesday’s impeachment vote.

University of Missouri law professor Frank O. Bowman told a committee hearing in January that, under the Constitution, impeachment “is not supposed to be a routine tool to resolve ordinary public policy debates, even very passionate ones” — and said that there was no suggestion that Mayorkas had carried out the serious types of offenses that impeachment is meant to be used against.

Gallagher wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal that the first article detailed what he described as Mayorkas’ “manifest incompetence” — but argued that this “doesn’t rise to the level of high crimes or misdemeanors.”

“Impeachment not only would fail to resolve Mr. Biden’s border crisis but would also set a dangerous new precedent that would be used against future Republican administrations,” he said.

Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.