House GOP impeaches Mayorkas by a single vote
www.washingtonpost.com
Republicans were waiting to see if they had enough members in D.C. to repeat their bid to impeach the Homeland Security secretary over his stewardship of the immigration system.

House Republicans moved in historic fashion and impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a single vote on Tuesday night, succeeding on their second try in punishing the steward of President Biden’s immigration policy.

The unprecedented and partisan resolution — which cleared the House over opposition from Democrats and three GOP members — may not go very far in the Senate, as some Republicans in the upper chamber do not believe that Mayorkas’s actions clear the bar for the high crimes and misdemeanors necessary for conviction. But Mayorkas is the first sitting Cabinet secretary to be impeached and some bipartisan and legal observers worry that the most serious tool the U.S. Constitution provides to rein in a public official is being misused as partisan weapon.

Archive

Edit: updated summary and archive to reflect article changes.

  • Wermhatswormhat@lemmy.world
    21·
    9 months ago

    I have a question, and I’m scared to just go look it up because of bias. Is there actually an influx of migrants at the border or is this just republicans riling up the masses again? I know for a fact that Trump did this during his presidency where the “caravan of migrants” was winding up Central America, but as soon as he had successfully deflected whatever else he was hiding from, suddenly there was no caravan to worry about.

    • TommySalami@lemmy.world
      20·
      9 months ago

      You’re gonna get a lot of different answers. The primary issue we’re facing with the border right now is not so much an unprecedented wave as much as it is an overloaded asylum system. Due to how we handle claims and the lack of manpower, individuals who may eventually be denied asylum are living in the US (still unable to legally work, I believe. Someone might check me on that) for years awaiting a trial date. Republicans are tackling this issue by focusing on solutions to non-existent problems, or are tossing the issue out when it seems the outcome might benefit democrats (i.e. no border bill, because then Dems can rightfully run on progress with the border issue). Dems have kicked this particular can down the road for a bit, and recently made a good faith effort in the Senate to construct a bill that would have addressed the actual pressing issue (the degree it would help is debatable, but it was objectively progress). That bill was killed by republicans for the aforementioned political reasons.

    • m_randall@sh.itjust.works
      13·
      9 months ago

      I got a little curious too and just did a small amount of digging. The DHS latest report (Q2 FY 2023) can be found here:

      https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/special-reports/legal-immigration

      “About 11,700 refugees were admitted to the United States in FY 2023 Q2 (Table 2), a 113 percent increase from FY 2022 Q2, when only about 5,500 refugees were admitted.”

      So about 4000 a month, 1000 per week and 150 per day.

      That includes countries other than South America:

      “76 percent of refugees arrived from the top five countries of nationality: Democratic Republic of Congo, Burma, Syria, Afghanistan, and Colombia“

      I haven’t found a great source on illegal immigration yet.

      Edit: I got also got curious about the scale of this number so I looked up births per day (from some random sites) in the US and it seems like that’s about 10,000. Number of deaths per day seems to be around 8,000. So a net of about 2,000 people are added to the US per day “naturally”.

      Last edit: Found some info by the cbp: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/nationwide-encounters

      Looks like an increase but nothing crazy. I don’t know what an “encounter” is either.