The impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas is a high-tech lynching of an American Jew
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security on Capitol Hill on May 4, 2022. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman January 12, 2024
Update: The House of Representatives voted to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas on Feb. 13, in a 214-213 vote after a previous failed attempt.
It looks like the high-tech lynching of Alejandro Mayorkas might really happen. Republicans figure they have enough votes to launch impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas, whom President Joe Biden appointed Secretary of Homeland Security in 2021.
Last Wednesday, House Republicans began hearings to impeach Mayorkas, accusing him of being, in the words of Homeland Security Committee Chair Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), “the architect of the devastation” at the country’s southern border.
“We’re going to impeach him,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) told The Hill. “He’s going to be impeached, and he should be.”
Even if the committee recommends impeachment and the House votes to impeach Mayorkas, there would still be a trial in the Senate, where a conviction requires a two-thirds vote.
The unlikelihood of Mayorkas becoming the first Cabinet secretary to be impeached since 1876 won’t stop Republicans from making him into a convenient scapegoat.
Will Jewish groups come to the defense of Mayorkas, the Jewish, Cuban-born son of Holocaust survivors? Or will they let Mayorkas, a dedicated civil servant who has repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism as a homeland security issue, twist in the wind?
House Republicans, who have cooled on their initial idea of impeaching Biden because, well, they couldn’t concoct a reason, have turned their sights on Mayorkas, accusing him of refusing to enforce existing immigration laws, breaking his oath to the Constitution.
Mayorkas may be dragged before the House Homeland Security Committee next week, which is just a little ironic. Just weeks after GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik earned Jewish community kudos for her public inquiry into antisemitism on college campuses, her colleagues are leveling charges at Mayorkas which are fueled in part by antisemitic conspiracy theories that have long infested the right’s immigration rhetoric.
In other words, to see the insidious tentacles of antisemitism, you won’t have to visit a college campus, just tune into C-SPAN.
Republicans don’t see it that way, of course. Mayorkas, said Homeland Security Committee Chair Green, “has doubled down on policies that he knows are hurting Americans; he knows they’re defying the law. I think it’s grounds for his impeachment.”
It’s not clear how the actual articles of impeachment will rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. The U.S. immigration system has been swamped by a record high number of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border — 2.5 million in 2023, 300,000 more than in 2022, which itself was a record.
Mayorkas initiated policies designed to handle the surge, which officials anticipated after the lifting of pandemic lockdown-era immigration restrictions. For various reasons, the crisis has deepened: an unanticipated number of migrants from Haiti and Venezuela, the long wait time to process work permits for asylum seekers, and misinformation spread by smuggling syndicates themselves.
Republicans, meanwhile, have rejected Biden’s request for $14 billion to increase border security. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has demanded policy changes instead, including more money for a border wall.
You would think both sides could come together and hammer out differences to solve what is essentially a policy problem. We can all agree that the current immigration system is broken, and that immigration itself is both an economic necessity and often a humanitarian imperative. Smart, bipartisan solutions exist.
Instead, Republicans, including Johnson, have infused their rhetoric with inflammatory accusations that cross a border of their own.
“This is the plan,” Johnson said in a 2022 committee hearing confrontation with New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, “to turn all the illegals into voters. That’s why the border’s open.”
The border is not open, of course, and neither Biden nor Mayorkas want it to be. But Johnson — along with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Stefanik herself — have been pushing the extreme view that Democrats seek to replace Republicans by letting in a flood of illegal immigrants and giving them the vote.
This so-called great replacement theory, pushed by Tucker Carlson and others on the right, holds that Democrats’ immigration policy is designed to flood the country with immigrants of color who will overwhelm white, Christian America. It’s the theory behind the chants of “Jews will not replace us” at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and according to the Anti-Defamation League, the theory has only gained traction since then.
Consider that while on the campaign trail recently, former President Donald Trump accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
But it’s on social media where the connection between the great replacement theory, Mayorkas and the impeachment hearings becomes frighteningly clear.
That Mayorkas is Jewish is hardly a secret. In the early 1940s, his Romanian-born mother fled to Cuba to escape the Nazis, who killed her entire extended family. She married Mayorkas’ father Nicky, who has Sephardic and Ashkenazi heritage. Following the Cuban Revolution, the Mayorkas family immigrated to the U.S. in 1960, where Mayorkas attended Beverly Hills High School, the University of California, Berkeley, and Loyola Law School.
“I have always been moved by Ali [Alejandro]’s words of memory, respect, and affection for his dear parents,” wrote Rabbi Uri Herscher, a longtime friend of Mayorkas, when he was nominated to the cabinet post, “who did not live to see the day when their beloved son returned to Havana as a representative of the American government, and then rise to a member of the President’s Cabinet.”
But on Twitter and the the even darker corners of the web, posters love to point to the fact that Mayorkas is Jewish as if its a hidden, missing piece of some grand conspiracy puzzle.
“Daily reminder that the person in charge of securing our borders, DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, is a jew,” reads one of many tweets linking Mayorkas’s border policy to a nefarious Zionist conspiracy theory to undermine white America.
“Alejandro Mayorkas is Jewish. Wondering why your country is collapsing? Look no further,” said another post, one of hundreds that purport to “reveal” the truth behind America’s immigration crisis.
These are the forces that hope to bring articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. No surprise that one of the leading representatives behind the effort is Greene, who seems to have found a conspiracy theory closer to home than the Jewish space lasers she once accused the Rothschilds of deploying.
Jewish leaders and organizations across the political spectrum need to stand up for Mayorkas. Whatever they think about the Biden administration’s handling of the border, they need to make clear this impeachment effort is not really about that. It’s about raising up a convenient scapegoat for a crackpot ideology — and we’ve all seen how that movie ends.
Correction: The original version of this article included several errors. Alejandro Mayorkas is Secretary of Homeland Security, not Homeland Defense, and he was appointed in 2021, not 2019. In addition, his Romanian-born mother fled to Cuba in the 1940s to escape the Nazis, she did not flee Cuba. And 1876 was the year the last cabinet secretary was impeached, not 1870.
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