“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.”
“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…
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