US House to vote again on impeaching Biden’s homeland security secretary

The US House of Representatives will vote on Tuesday on whether to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, on explicitly political charges related to deteriorating conditions at the southern border and Republican attempts to capitalise on the issue in an election year.

The vote follows an embarrassing failure for the House speaker, Mike Johnson, last week, when Republican absences and defections contributed to defeat in a first vote.

If Republicans are successful, the effort to remove Mayorkas – for allegedly refusing to enforce immigration law – now moves to the Senate, where it has next to no chance of producing a conviction.

Last weekend, Mayorkas told NBC Republicans’ allegations against him were “baseless … and that’s why I’m really not distracted by them.

“I’m focused on the work of the Department of Homeland Security. I’m inspired every single day by the remarkable work that 216,000 men and women in our department perform on behalf of the American public.”

Conditions at the border with Mexico, where numbers of undocumented migrants remain high, “certainly” represented “a crisis”, Mayorkas said.

But he said the Biden administration did not “bear responsibility for a broken system. And we’re doing a tremendous amount within that broken system. But fundamentally, Congress is the only one who can fix it.”

Last week, Republicans in the Senate abandoned and sank an immigration and border deal, reached after extensive negotiations with Democrats, after Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee, made his opposition clear.

After the failure of the first Mayorkas impeachment vote, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, a Republican who voted no and was subjected to intense pressure to change his