To his supporters, Alejandro Mayorkas is a thoughtful, driven secretary — a “Boy Scout” — who brings a prosecutor’s tenacity and his personal understanding of the immigrant experience in America to running his sprawling agency. To his detractors, he personifies everything that has gone wrong at the U.S.-Mexico border and is responsible for allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States illegally in a burgeoning crisis.
Mayorkas, often referred to as Ali, is the first Latino and the first immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security, one of the government’s biggest agencies with 260,000 employees. And if House Republicans get their way, he’ll also be the first Cabinet member impeached in nearly 150 years.
Running the department was never going to be an easy job for Alejandro Mayorkas.
The agency was forged in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to bring together 22 various agencies and departments. Tom Warrick, a former top counterterrorism official at the agency who is now at the Atlantic Council, says it’s the second-toughest job in Washington.
“Only the president’s is tougher. The secretary of DHS has to oversee the most diverse mission portfolio in the federal government. And almost all of it is a high-wire act where failure would have enormous consequences,” Warrick said.
In just a few examples of the agency’s diverse responsibilities, over the past year Homeland Security worked with historically Black colleges and universities to respond to bomb threats, set up an AI-task force to figure out how best to use the nascent technology and protect President Joe Biden on his trip to Ukraine.
But it is the department’s role in immigration that has made Mayorkas a target of impeachment. The House could vote on impeachment as soon as this coming week, although it’s unclear whether Republicans have enough support within their slim majority to push it through.
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