The House could vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in the coming weeks after a key House committee kicked off its impeachment of President Biden’s top border official. Republicans have said they want to move swiftly. 

During a Wednesday hearing, members of the House Homeland Security Committee heard from legal experts about the historic number of migrant crossings at the border. Appearing before the committee were the attorneys general of Montana, Oklahoma, and Missouri — Austin Knudsen, Gentner Drummond, and Andrew Bailey, respectively. The committee also heard testimony from law professor Frank Bowman. 

The chairman of the committee, Congressman Mark Green, said in his opening statement that it is Mr. Mayorkas — not congressional Republicans — who is responsible for the impeachment hearings. 

“The secretary’s refusal to change course on the reckless decisions facilitating this crisis have left us with no reasonable alternative than to pursue the possibility of impeachment,” Mr. Green said. “The secretary’s actions have brought us here today, not ours.”

Mr. Knudson, whose state is just about as far from the southern border as possible, told stories about illegal drugs coming into his state, particularly on Native American reservations. 

“In just one week during March 2022, 17 people on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation overdosed on fentanyl,” he said. “Four of them died. I spoke with a woman later that year from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which is where I’m from. She was raising her grandkids because both of her sons were killed in two separate fentanyl overdose incidents. Nationwide, indigenous people suffer the highest rate of fentanyl overdoses. In Montana, the opioid overdose death rate among Native Americans is twice that of white people.”

The impeachment process kicked off late last year when the House voted to shelve a floor vote on impeaching the secretary and instead referred it to the committee. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who introduced the articles of impeachment on the floor in December, won assurances from Speaker Johnson that the Homeland Security Committee would conduct a serious inquiry into the matter. 

Mr. Mayorkas has long insisted that the migrant crossings — totaling more than 300,000 in December alone — are a result of congressional inaction on comprehensive immigration reform. 

“Everyone agrees that the system is broken, and what we are doing is enforcing our laws,” he told CBS News on January 4. “Our criminal laws, our immigration laws — and that includes our asylum laws — and when people come to the United States at the border, they are placed in immigration enforcement proceedings and those proceedings take many years because our system is broken.”

He also blamed politicians like Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, for inflaming the problem by shipping migrants to localities that typically do not deal with those who cross the southern border and do not have the capacity to care for them, house them, or feed them. 

“Do you think it is responsible governance for one governor to refuse to coordinate, communicate, cooperate with other state officials around the country and just unilaterally bus people to another locality without informing the receiving locality so that we can work together to address a challenge that our country faces?” the secretary continued. “Is that the type of patriotism and governance that we expect of our officials?”

The prospect of impeaching the secretary comes as he is working day and night with a bipartisan group of senators on a comprehensive immigration reform and border security bill. Republicans have demanded changes to immigration and asylum policy in exchange for foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. 

The lead Democrat in the immigration reform negotiations, Senator Murphy, told the Sun on Wednesday that he would refrain from commenting on the process. 

His Republican counterpart, Senator Lankford, met with the conservative House Republican Study Committee on Wednesday to discuss where the Senate negotiations stood. 

Congressman Warren Davidson told the Sun that there were some “exciting” parts of the proposal that Mr. Lankford unveiled, but he would not be able to judge until the legislative text is released. One Republican from a Biden-won district, Congressman Nick LaLota, told the Sun that he needs to make sure that any legislation “requires” that the president and homeland security secretary take action.