YUMA, Ariz. — An elated crowd inside Yuma’s city hall cheered Thursday for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ potential impeachment after a neighborhood official accused him of lying about plans to shut gaps within the US-Mexico border wall.
Jonathan Lines, a member of the Yuma County Board of Supervisors, testified at a House Judiciary Committee field hearing, which was boycotted by panel Democrats, that Mayorkas falsely said he’d address openings which might be popular avenues for illegal immigration and drug smuggling.
“Has Secretary Mayorkas ever lied to you?” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) asked Lines, who was certainly one of three witnesses on the hearing.
“Yes,” Lines said to chuckles from a crowd of greater than 200 within the hearing chamber.
“What was the substance of that lie?” asked Gaetz.
“The mayor and I had the chance to go to with Secretary Mayorkas and the Yuma [Border Patrol] sector chief … at sector headquarters almost a yr ago,” Lines said. “And through that meeting he committed to, after reviewing the border each from the bottom and the air, to specifically address ‘nine of the 11 Yuma gaps.’”
“And the way lots of those gaps have been addressed?” asked Gaetz.
“Up to now to date? None. We see infrastructure on two and yet they might not deter anyone,” Lines said.
“It seems as if it’s not an amazing mystery where the pressure points are where now we have gaps within the wall and where now we have recalcitrant [Native American] tribes,” Gaetz said — after touring two such gaps Wednesday night with fellow committee members.
Lines added he believes Mayorkas has “a scarcity of will” to follow through and seal up the wall — which was left unfinished at the top of the Trump administration. President Biden halted all wall construction in January 2021, however the White House said in July that it will close gaps near Yuma.
“We’ve followed up multiple times — in addition to Yuma sector of Border Patrol staff — and with undersecretaries, and we were told time and time again that they were issuing contracts, that we might have it no later than June of last yr, then no later than September, then no later than November. Each time it kept getting pushed out,” Lines said.
“I used to be patient each time that I called they usually continued to push this process out. It’s not reasonable.”
The group erupted when Gaetz called for Mayorkas’ outster of Lines’ testimony.
“The day will come soon when Secretary Mayorkas has to return and answer our questions. And to my colleagues, if he’ll mislead Mr. Lines and mislead the community here, then he’ll mislead us and he’ll mislead the American people,” Gaetz said. “And that’s why I’m very proud to cosponsor Representative [Andy] Biggs’ articles of impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas, because this will not be a scarcity of ability, it’s a scarcity of will.”
Asked if Mayorkas was securing the border, Yuma Sheriff Leon Wilmont gave a one-word answer: “No.”
Later within the hearing, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), who initially was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 2018 before switching parties the next yr, said he plans to vote for the secretary’s impeachment — saying “Mayorkas has committed treason.”
“After all I applauded,” highschool teacher Malba Alvarez told The Post afterward.
Mayorkas “hasn’t even been present to see in point of fact what the gaps are” and “he must turn out to be higher informed,” said Alvarez, who lives within the town of San Luis, just southwest of Yuma.
One other attendee, retiree Donna Angel, sat near the witness table wearing a t-shirt promoting Nikki Haley’s 2024 Republican presidential candidacy and said she cheered for Mayorkas’ impeachment “because nothing’s getting done.”
“We now have an issue here and he says we don’t,” said Angel, who also lives outside Yuma and said she was particularly perturbed that inland Homeland Security checkpoints in the realm haven’t been manned through the Biden administration, depriving the region of a secondary level of border security.
Committee Republicans took turns on the hearing tearing into their Democratic colleagues for skipping the delegation visit to Yuma.
“Just fentanyl alone needs to be a national emergency in America and I can’t imagine we wouldn’t have colleagues on the opposite side of the aisle [here],” fumed a red-faced Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.).
The Biden administration recently has touted the quantity of fentanyl seized along the border, noting record hauls of the potent synthetic opioid that may kill with doses the dimensions of 10 grains of salt, with Biden himself saying this month at his annual State of the Union that border authorities had seized “over 23,000 kilos of fentanyl in only the last several months.”
However the Republican panel members pointed to record-high fentanyl death statistics and sought to poke holes in Democratic arguments that almost all of the fentanyl is smuggled through legal ports of entry fairly than across unwalled sections of frontier.
At one point, Lines said the newest fentanyl seizure statistics show an increasing share found between border stops. He linked the rise to a discount of migrants crossing within the Yuma area in January, which freed up Border Patrol officials to commit more attention to drug-runners.
There have been about 196,000 US deaths from fentanyl from 2018 through 2021. Fentanyl death data from 2022 isn’t yet available, though the toll is predicted to stay near all-time highs because the compound, largely sourced from China and smuggled through Mexico, is increasingly mixed into cocaine and counterfeit prescriptions, killing unwitting users.
The hearing focused on a big selection of border-linked issues, starting from the burden of unreimbursed healthcare on a neighborhood hospital, damage to local crops and violence attributable to drug cartels and their alleged mistreatment of migrants, which several legislators said amounted to “slavery” or “indentured servitude.”
The Biden administration has presided over a record surge in illegal immigration — with nearly 2.4 million illegal border-crossing arrests in fiscal 2022, which ended Sept. 30, up from 1.7 million in fiscal 2021, fewer than 500,000 in 2020 and nearly 1 million in 2019.
Thus far, fiscal 2023 is on pace to set one other record, with greater than 762,000 Southwest border apprehensions recorded from Oct. 1 through Jan. 31 — up 18.3% from the identical period one yr prior. There reportedly were 1.2 million known “gotaways” who eluded arrest in the primary 24 months of Biden’s presidency, in response to US Customs and Border Protection data.
Critics blame the border crisis on Biden’s policies, including relaxing the Trump-era mandate to quickly deport border-crossers under a CDC COVID-19 rule and in addition ending a policy of requiring migrants to remain in Mexico to await court ruling on their asylum claims. Biden officials say a policy much like Trump’s “remain in Mexico” program will likely be enacted in May to interchange the CDC rule, though it’s unclear how strictly it can be enforced.