Washington:

Joe Biden’s immigration chief narrowly escaped impeachment over the U.S. border crisis on Tuesday in a party-line vote that Democrats cast as a political stunt ahead of a presidential election in which immigration is expected to be a major issue.

Condemnation of the failure was led by hardline House Republicans, who for months have targeted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as illegal immigration surged at the southern border.

Republicans had been struggling with what was expected to be a close vote, and the results proved so — three members of the party sided with Democrats in the vote, which ended in a 216-214 vote for Mayorkas. win.

Impeachment is the political equivalent of an indictment, and Mayorkas would face the prospect of being tried in the Senate, although he would be acquitted by the Democratic-led upper chamber and allowed to keep his job.

The House, which has only impeached one other Cabinet official in its history, Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876, voted once on two articles charging Mayorca with failing to enforce the law and lying to Congress. .

Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, and two conservatives announced their opposition to impeachment ahead of the vote, irritating the leadership team’s nerves. After the vote, a third opponent unexpectedly joined them, killing the impeachment movement.

“The Biden administration’s failure to rein in open borders is a national disgrace and will be a stain on his presidential legacy,” Ken Buck, one of Colorado’s Republican rebels, wrote in an op-ed in the congressional newspaper The Hill road.

“However, the reality is that this is a policy disagreement cloaked in impeachment.”

Another opponent, California’s Tom McClintock, issued a 10-page memo accusing his party of failing to identify impeachable “high crimes or misdemeanors.”

-“Political Stunt”-

The impeachment resolution accuses Mayorkas of “willfully and systematically refusing to comply with the laws that protect the United States’ borders” and accuses him of “violating the public trust.”

Minority Whip Katherine Clark said: “Impeaching a Cabinet member without any evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor? That’s a violation of the public trust.”

The vote comes amid a showdown between the House and Senate over curbing a surge in illegal immigration that saw a record 10,000 people arrested a day at the border in December.

House Republicans have been accused of undermining Mayorca’s impeachment by opposing a bipartisan Senate deal that would impose the toughest asylum and border policies in decades.

Republicans initially pushed for the measures as a condition of aid to Ukraine.

But opposition to the bill grew into a major backlash as former President Donald Trump, who is seeking re-election and sees immigration as one of Biden’s biggest weaknesses, warned his party against the bill.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries accused Republicans of catering to Trump’s White House ambitions even as they work to fix a “broken immigration system.”

“Instead, what you have to offer the American people is this sham impeachment, this political stunt, this waste of time. But you’re not going to fool the American people,” he said.

House Democrats voted unanimously against impeachment, and the White House and Department of Homeland Security also strongly opposed impeachment.

“I think it’s baseless. I think it’s a political process and I’m not involved in politics,” Mayorkas told The New York Times Magazine as part of a media charm offensive ahead of the vote.

In an interview with The Washington Post, he denounced the Republican Party’s “accusatory rather than solution-focused” politics.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)