During a hearing last week of the House Committee on Homeland Security, member Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) tore into the Republican impeachment efforts targeting top officials in the Biden administration that are slowly taking shape.
Proposed articles of impeachment against the president that falsely allege operational control at the southern border has gone to foreign criminal organizations have already been filed, though the list of targets continues from there, with Republicans also naming Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“We’re interested in real solutions, not going along with Republican attacks and the crusade to launch fake impeachments of Secretary Mayorkas for political gain,” Garcia said of Democrats in Congress.
“And I also want to note, just to clarify the record, that more than 90 percent of hard drugs such as fentanyl enter the U.S. through legal crossings at ports of entry, which continue to be forgotten over and over again,” Garcia continued, rebutting Republicans’ focus on statistics like the numbers of people believed to have entered the U.S. between such ports without entering the government’s custody. “Democrats have increased funding for ports of entry in the government funding package last year, which Republicans, of course, overwhelmingly opposed. And so we keep hearing, over and over again, solutions that are not serious, which is why we never seem to discuss treatment programs here in this committee. There’s no answers for how to improve access to health care or tackle the mental health crisis that’s happening in our country.”
Garcia also got every member of the witness panel, which included individuals loudly in support of Republican arguments, to acknowledge that they’d either never received or heard of a direct order from the president to stop enforcing U.S. laws around the border. The answers upended the Republican insistence that the southern border is “open” or even under the operational control of foreign criminal organizations, though some Republicans remain committed to that line of argument and have even backed the idea of using U.S. military might to target those cartels. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) claimed there to be an “open” border during that very hearing.
Check out the hearing below:
