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

Alejandro Mayorkas goes to work on the grounds of a place once known as the Government Hospital for the Insane. These days, the Southeast Washington campus, now known as St. Elizabeths, houses offices of the Department of Homeland Security - including one belonging to Mayorkas, who runs that agency for President Biden. The secretariat is on the second floor of a red-brick collegiate Gothic building, up an inclining hairpin turn, past a gym and drab little cottages. If you work here late at night, it is said, you see strange things.

“My hours are very, very long,” Mayorkas said in his office last Thursday. After 7:30 p.m., he’s been leaving his calendar open so he can keep working. Homeland Security secretary, in 2024, is the type of job that could drive someone mad. But Mayorkas seems in control of himself, even if the immigration debate is out of hand.

“I did not expect this level of polarization. And I did not expect this level of politics,” he said. Long pause. “Level and nature of politics.”

Meaning?

“Accusatory, rather than solution-focused. Baselessly accusatory.”

Last week, the Republican-controlled House Homeland Security Committee voted along party lines to advance two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, charging him with “breach of trust” and “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” The full House is expected to vote on it this week. It’s the latest escalation in congressional Republicans’ efforts to blame a spike in illegal border crossings on the Biden administration, as well as their desire to impeach somebody, if not Biden himself.

“Very difficult to make sense of it,” Mayorkas said of the prospect of impeachment. “It’s very difficult. So I don’t try to make sense of it.”

He picked his words carefully. “I’m doing my work. I’m doing my work. And um, making sure it doesn’t distract me from it.”

Mayorkas, an even-keeled policy wonk, says he’d rather be working on getting the resources to enlarge the Department of Homeland Security, already a many-tentacled, 260,000-employee department whose remit involves everything from domestic intelligence to cybersecurity to Arctic policy. Among the items in his wish list: More Border Patrol agents. More asylum officers. Better pay for Transportation Security Administration workers. “More vessels of different types” for the Coast Guard. More resources for a “strapped” Secret Service in an election year. “More nonintrusive inspection technology at the ports of entry.”

The secretary’s bedside manner was warm - yet guarded when talking about the politics of his job. At times, his expression dropped and he tapped his foot. He spoke of incendiary rhetoric in flame-resistant terms.

“Levels matter. Degrees matter. There are, you know, there’s a challenge. There are levels of severity of challenges. There are politics, and there are levels of politicization. It’s pretty extraordinary right now.”

“The rhetoric is more extreme. The polarization. I see less reaching across divides to bridge them.”

Arguably, the current Republican push to impeach Mayorkas has little to do with him personally. Trump’s allies in Congress would probably have threatened to impeach anyone holding that post, said Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official who famously criticized Trump under a pen name while working for his administration.

“Whoever’s in that job kind of becomes a Rorschach test for where a critic stands on the political spectrum,” Taylor said. “So if someone thinks the border is a mess, they’re going to hate the homeland security secretary. And if someone thinks that the Biden administration has reversed the worst offenses of the Trump years, they’re going to be grateful for the person in that job.”

When Biden appointed him in November 2020, he introduced Mayorkas as an answer to “years of chaos, dysfunction and absolute cruelty at DHS.” Mayorkas, himself a Havana-born refugee, had helped engineer the DACA immigrant-relief program as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and prosecuted drug traffickers as a U.S. attorney in Los Angeles.

At first, activists on the left were optimistic. The Biden administration paused deportations for 100 days, put new checks on deportation officers and closed down detention centers with histories of immigrant mistreatment. “It was huge to see it go in that direction, and it was so significant,” said Silky Shah, the executive director of Detention Watch Network, of those early changes. “But then very quickly, they faltered and the Republicans took back the narrative on the border.”

The Biden administration disappointed the left by continuing a Trump-era policy, known as “Title 42,” that had empowered border officials to quickly expel migrants who crossed the border illegally. As the policy was set to end, the administration announced it was proposing another rule that penalized asylum seekers who cross the border illegally or decline to seek protection in Mexico - a rule activists panned as an “asylum ban.” “Our borders are not open,” Mayorkas said then from the White House briefing-room podium when the Title 42 policy wound down in May.

He did open other, legal pathways for those fleeing humanitarian crises such as Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. The idea was that opening more legal avenues to the United States would reduce illegal immigration through the southern border.

Nevertheless, Border Patrol counted almost 250,000 illegal crossings in December, an all-time high.

Republicans started making louder noises about going after Mayorkas in late 2022, as they anticipated taking back control of the House in the midterm elections. A few weeks after the midterms sealed a narrow majority for the GOP, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) upped the ante at an El Paso news conference. “If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign,” he said, “House Republicans will investigate every order, every action and every failure to determine whether we can begin an impeachment inquiry.”

Over the next year, Republicans in the House Homeland Security Committee would haul him into hours-long hearings that turned into partisan food fights. Republicans built a case - considered by many constitutional scholars to be baseless - that Mayorkas had willfully violated the law, including a statute that required the secretary to maintain “operational control” of the border, or the ability to prevent all illegal entries into the country.

In other words, if the border wasn’t completely sealed then the secretary was violating the law, and impeachment could be on the table. On top of that, Republicans argue that Mayorkas has not adequately enforced immigration policy and ignored court orders. This, they say, has resulted in an increase in illegal immigration.

No one who’s had Mayorkas’ job has completely sealed the border, including Trump appointees.

“Let’s assume you had a magic wand, and you could just kind of shut it all down tomorrow,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who befriended Mayorkas while working as a senior domestic-policy adviser in the Obama administration. “Would people still try to come, you think? I think the answer that is yes. And part of the reason we know that is because the Trump administration took people’s children - and it did not stop the flow.”

Mayorkas will probably stay at his post whether House Republicans impeach him or not. The Democratic-controlled Senate is unlikely to convict him - or it could invoke a number of procedural moves to skip it altogether. If the impeachment push does go through the House, would he resign?

“No.”

Has he discussed that with his boss?

“I have not. I serve at the will of the president. And I’m incredibly devoted to this job. And I will continue to be.”

In that case, what do Republicans stand to gain from going through with it?

“The majority is all about showing the American people we did what you wanted,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.). The spidery immigration issue - for which an impeachment vote is arguably a stand-in - is the source of madness for many Republican voters, Buck said. The kind of thing a GOP incumbent gets primaried over. The message goes: “If you’re mad, we hear you. You need to send us back in office so we can do even more next time.”

Buck isn’t running for reelection, and plans to vote against impeachment. For him, the evidence falls short of the high impeachment bar, and even bumping Mayorkas out of office wouldn’t fix much. If Republicans force him out, “So what?” Buck said. “Biden appoints somebody else. The Democratic Senate confirms somebody else. It’s the Biden administration’s policies he’s implementing.”

The administration’s policies may soon change. For months, Mayorkas has advised three senators - James Lankford (R-Okla.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) - as they hammered out a deal that would give the president broader powers to turn immigrants away, which Biden has said he’d use.

On Sunday night, the trio of Senate negotiators revealed the 370-page bill. If enacted, it would make it harder for immigrants to apply and qualify for asylum, expand the government’s detention capacity and send billions to Homeland Security for more border agents, asylum officers and deportations flights. It mints new authority for Biden to close the border if daily crossings reach a certain number, meaning that migrants who cross illegally would be summarily turned away. The package also includes improved access to legal counsel for immigrant children, expedited asylum decisions and new employment and family visas - and pairs these measures with greater foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. It does not include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here.

Getting that bill through Congress would be a landmark achievement for Mayorkas. “I’d like to see us implement it and make a significant difference in what we are experiencing at the southern border,” he said.

The bill immediately met criticism - some liberals saying it was too hawkish, some conservatives saying it was too dovish. “Like an enforcement wish list from the Trump administration,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) called it, also decrying the lack of Latino lawmakers involved. Urging Republicans to reject it, Donald Trump wrote online: “Don’t be STUPID!!!” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said he won’t immediately put the bill up for a vote.

If Mayorkas’s mission was to bridge the divide, the levels of severity in the politics still look extraordinary. Or, put another way: Getting this job done isn’t as simple as doing the work.

Republicans have not only tried to confront Mayorkas with numbers and talking points. Last April, during a hearing, Rep. August Pfluger (R-Tex.) produced a poster board showing two Texans - a young girl and her grandmother. Pfluger told the story of how they’d been killed when a migrant smuggler crashed into them while trying to elude the police.

Behind him, four relatives of the victims stood from their seats. Pfluger said they were at the hearing “because of the failures of you and your administration,” though he didn’t articulate which specific policies had led to the crash. According to several local news reports and a police report, the driver was transporting 11 undocumented immigrants - two of whom were also killed - at the time of the collision.

The congressman wanted the secretary to apologize in public to the family of the Americans killed. “They’re right there, They’re standing right there,” he said.

Mayorkas stood up, tugged at his suit jacket, fidgeted with his hands. “Our heart breaks for your loss,” he told them. “Our heart breaks for the loss of all victims of criminal activity.”

Elisa Tambunga, whose daughter and mother were killed in the crash, wasn’t satisfied with the apology. But she did sit down with Mayorkas after the hearing ended, in an adjoining room.

“I shared a very, very, very private video of my daughter after the crash. And I made him watch it,” Tambunga said after the hearing. “And I said, ‘Don’t you dare look away. You need to see what’s happening.’ And he watched it. And from that moment, I saw human come out, I saw emotion come out. It hit him.”

Mayorkas apologized again, she said, and this time she found it genuine.

“To meet a mother who lost her child - if one does not find that to be emotional, then I don’t understand or recognize that person. It’s just extraordinarily tragic,” Mayorkas said of the exchange, back in his office. Managing emotions, reassuring families that his remedies will work - that’s also part of the job, he said.

And: “Those losses should not be politicized.”

Reached last week, Tambunga said that she’d like to see Mayorkas impeached.

Recently, President Biden has started articulating his immigration message in the same political terms that Republicans have been using to criticize his administration’s policies - he’s said he’s willing to “shut down the border” and referred to the situation there as a “crisis.”

Of those words, Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.), one of Biden’s campaign co-chairs, recently told Politico: “I was not happy. That’s absolutely not language or terminology that I would use. Not today, not ever.”

Mayorkas, who had been using the word “challenge” instead of “crisis,” said he wasn’t told that his boss’s rhetoric was shifting levels. But it didn’t surprise him.

“I will tell you that I am not focused on the words one uses,” said Mayorkas, a man who is purposeful about his own. “I am focused on what we need to do. That is my focus. It is a very serious challenge. And we are focused on it every single day.”

One wonders if Mayorkas would stay in the job for a second Biden term.

Mayorkas wouldn’t comment on that. He had to jump on a call with a senator.