Speaker Mike Johnson has released 64 examples of the Biden administration “undermining border security policy and encouraging illegal immigration.”
In a January 9 press release announcing the comprehensive list, Johnson blasted the White House for attempting to shift the blame for the border crisis onto House Republicans.
A week earlier, Johnson led a delegation of 64 Republican House members to Texas to tour the Eagle Pass port of entry. White House spokesman Andrew Bates blasted the trip as a political stunt and accused the Republicans of blocking the president’s border security efforts.
Bates accused Speaker Johnson of blocking efforts by the White House to hire additional Border Patrol agents, immigration judges, and asylum officers.
In his press release, Johnson dismissed Bates’ claims as “untrue” or “previously disproven,” and said the claims “underscored” the administration’s failure to secure the border.
Johnson said the 64 examples showed all of the ways President Biden “manipulated the federal bureaucracy” to keep the southern border open for illegals, human traffickers, potential terrorists, and illicit drugs like fentanyl.
The speaker said the president’s actions had resulted in a “humanitarian and national security catastrophe.” He urged Biden to use executive authority “to repair what he has broken.”
The speaker’s comprehensive list was released just one day before the House Homeland Security Committee held its first hearing in pursuit of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Homeland Committee Chairman Mark Green argued that impeachment is not limited to criminal actions but could also be used to remove officials due to “gross incompetence” if their conduct endangers the lives of the American people, was a betrayal of public trust, or “represented a neglect of duty.”
In a statement last Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security described the impeachment inquiry against Mayorkas as “extreme” and warned that it would be “a harmful distraction” from the DHS’s “national security priorities.”
