“Purposefully Endanger[Ing] Americans” Chip Roy Announces Plan to Impeach DHS SEC. Mayorkas Over the Border Crisis

Congressman Chip Roy (R. TX) announced Wednesday, in a letter to Republican leadership, his plan to pursue impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his mishandling of the border crisis.

Congressman Roy stated in his letter that “It is most certainly a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ for a public officer to purposefully endanger Americans while willfully ignoring one’s oath to enforce our laws. Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas is our duty.”

Secretary Mayorkas “has willfully, actively, and unnecessarily put Americans in danger.”

The letter went on to outline Congressman Roy’s case for impeachment. “The U.S. Senate confirmed Secretary Mayorkas just over one year ago, and he subsequently took an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’ and to ‘well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.’ Yet, following the orders of President Biden or acting on his own—he has embarked on the purposeful abandonment of the laws of the United States and the successful policies of the previous administration to secure our borders and protect our people.”

Emphasizing the harm caused by the border crisis, Congressman Roy stated that “His actions have resulted in the death and endangerment of Americans, damage to property and communities across the border, loss of operational control of our border to dangerous cartels imprisoning thousands of migrants sold into human trafficking, and the fueling of deadly drug poisonings of thousands of Americans.”

“Secretary Mayorkas has not only failed to maintain operational control of the border, defined in law as the ‘prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband,’ but his actions have also actively facilitated the loss of it.”

“He is an accomplice to the violation of our laws and our national sovereignty.”

Since President Biden took office in 2021, illegal border crossings have quadrupled to nearly two million per year. There have been over eight hundred thousand illegal border encounters in Fiscal Year 2022 to date. Deportation rates, meanwhile, fell by 68% year over year from 2020 to 2021. 2021 Deportations were a mere fifty-nine thousand, compared with over two hundred fifty-thousand deportations in 2019.