Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley amplified pressure on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Wednesday as House Republicans prepare impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas to release Tuesday.
In a new letter to the embattled secretary, Hawley condemned Biden administration security failures at the southern border amid record illegal crossings. Citing a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office, Hawley admonished Mayorkas for “a record-setting 860,000 illegal immigrants [who] crossed into the United States without encountering a border official in fiscal year 2023 alone.”
“These ‘gotaways’ outnumber the combined populations of Kansas City and St. Louis, the two largest cities in Missouri,” Hawley wrote. “It is abundantly clear that the longer you remain in office, the worse the crisis at our southern border becomes.”
In major American cities, officials who declared “sanctuaries” for illegal entrants have struggled to manage the historic influx of foreign citizens. Democrat mayors of Chicago, New York, and Denver — “sanctuary cities” where migrants are arriving by the busload — pled for White House intervention in December.
“All of our cities have reached a point where we are either close to capacity, or nearly out of room,” said Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
December set a new record for the number of alien encounters in a single month, with more than 300,000 reported by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). An estimated 1.7 million more known “gotaways” have come in undetected since President Joe Biden took office, according to the House judiciary committee. In his letter Wednesday, Hawley demands the Department of Homeland Security provide additional estimates regarding how many migrants have crossed illegally without apprehension.
“These unprecedented figures underscore the need for you to be fully transparent about your Department’s own accounting of the southern border crisis,” Hawley wrote. Last week, Hawley sent a separate letter admonishing the Department of Homeland Security for prioritizing a dystopian federal censorship regime over securing the border.
[RELATED: Hawley Blasts DHS Propaganda Grant To ‘Counter’ Conservatives]
“Your Department has consistently weaponized the federal government to attack conservatives using taxpayer dollars, first by colluding with private social media companies to censor conservative viewpoints and now by funding private actors to create affirmative propaganda to ‘counter’ conservatives,” Hawley wrote. “All these funds should be clawed back by the federal government immediately, and anyone involved in making this grant should be fired.”
The Supreme Court stepped in this week to interfere with Texas’s work to fortify the border as the federal government abandons its constitutional duty to secure citizens’ right to national defense. In a 5-4 ruling, the high court empowered the federal government to strip state-installed wiring along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass.
House Republicans are expected to draw up four articles of impeachment against the homeland security secretary on Tuesday.
