Alejandro Mayorkas

Alejandro Mayorkas (born November 24, 1959, Havana, Cuba) is the secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security (2021– ). He is a former federal prosecutor and served in other high-ranking federal positions during Pres. Barack Obama’s administration (2009–17). In January 2024 the Republican-led House of Representatives advanced two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, charging him with “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and with a “breach of public trust” in response to accusations by House Republicans that Mayorkas had failed to enforce federal laws regarding immigration and had allowed the release of thousands of migrants who had been apprehended after entering the country at the U.S.-Mexico border. While the first vote failed, on February 13, 2024, Mayorkas became just the second presidential cabinet member to be impeached by the House. On April 17 the Senate, which was controlled by Democrats, dismissed the charges without holding a trial.

Early life and law career

Mayorkas was born in Havana in November 1959, less than a year after the dictator Fulgencio Batista was ousted from power by the Fidel Castro-led Cuban Revolution. Mayorkas’s mother, Anita Mayorkas (née Gabor), was a Romanian Jew whose family had immigrated to Cuba in the 1940s after first fleeing to France to escape the Holocaust. In Cuba she met his father, Carlos (later Charles; better known as “Nicky”) Mayorkas, a Cuban-born Jew, whose parents were of Turkish and Polish origin and who had studied at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. At the time of Alejandro’s birth, his father owned and operated a steel-wool mill on the outskirts of Havana. In 1960 the family (including Mayorkas’s elder sister, Cathy) decamped for Miami, as did many other affluent Cubans who were concerned about their future under Castro’s revolutionary government. Later the family moved to Beverly Hills, California, where one of Nicky Mayorkas’s cousins had offered him a job as the bookkeeper of a textile company.

After a childhood that was less affluent than his family’s location in Beverly Hills may suggest, Alejandro Mayorkas earned a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley (1981), and then received a law degree from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles (1985). Following several years of private practice, he went on to work at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, one of the Justice Department’s largest districts, where he came to be viewed as one of the office’s best trial lawyers, as his former boss told The Washington Post in 2021. Among other white-collar cases, he prosecuted Heidi Fleiss, the “Hollywood Madam,” operator of an upscale prostitution ring, for tax evasion.

Having been nominated as a U.S. attorney in 1998 by Pres. Bill Clinton, Mayorkas became the country’s youngest top federal prosecutor at the time, and he focused much of his attention on fraud cases. In an article in Los Angeles Magazine in 2000, journalist Ross Johnson compared him favorably to Rudy Giuliani, saying that unlike the New York mayor and former prosecutor, Mayorkas was not fixated on getting press attention. “Talk to almost anyone who knows him,…and they’ll tell you that Mayorkas is a good, honest man in a job not always suited for the type.” Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Times noted in 2000 that Mayorkas had “a reputation of being politically savvy—and extremely ambitious—as well as being a tough prosecutor.” At the turn of the century, he came in for criticism for his alleged role in supporting an effort to win clemency from President Clinton for the son of a wealthy donor to the Democratic Party who was serving a prison sentence for drug trafficking, though Mayorkas claimed that contacts he made in the matter were only information-gathering in nature.

Service in the Obama administration and leadership of the Department of Homeland Security

Mayorkas worked in private practice during George W. Bush’s presidency (2001–09). In 2009 Pres. Barack Obama appointed him to lead U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Mayorkas was praised for the speedy launch of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, among other achievements. But he was accused of intervening in a visa program on behalf of wealthy foreign investors. The DHS inspector general found that Mayorkas had “created an appearance of favoritism and special access,” though he had not broken any laws.

In 2013 Mayorkas became the deputy secretary of DHS, the first foreign-born person ever to run the department. He visited Cuba in 2015, as part of the Obama administration’s broader effort to overhaul U.S. relations with the country.

Mayorkas returned to private practice during Donald Trump’s presidency (2017–21). In November 2020 he was nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to head DHS, which includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He was confirmed by the Senate in February 2021, but the 56–43 vote was the tightest for any Biden nominee up to that point. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a fellow Cuban American but one known for his hawkish stance toward the island, criticized Mayorkas for what Rubio characterized as his plans to “undo the sensible protections put in place by the Trump Administration.”

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As the head of DHS, Mayorkas oversaw the creation of a task force charged with reuniting families that had been separated at the southern border under Trump’s administration. As of early 2023 some 600 children had been reunited with their parents, but another 1,000 remained separated.

Also during Mayorkas’s tenure, the Biden administration has scaled back Trump’s plans for a physical wall on the Mexico border. Instead, it has focused on building a high-tech “virtual wall,” consisting of surveillance technology. The administration’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposed some $26 billion for border and immigration enforcement, the largest amount ever devoted to the issue.

Impeachment

In November 2023 Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called for Mayorkas to be impeached, citing the rising numbers of migrants who had tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally since 2021. In January 2024 House Republicans announced two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, saying that he had refused to comply with the law and had violated public trust. However, a number of conservative commentators—including Michael Chertoff, the secretary of DHS in the administration of George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009, and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal—criticized the effort. Impeaching Mayorkas “won’t change enforcement policy,” the board wrote, “and is a bad precedent that will open the gates to more cabinet impeachments by both parties.” On February 6 a resolution to impeach Mayorkas failed by a 214–216 vote in the House. Three Republicans joined all of the House Democrats in voting against the measure (a fourth Republican switched to a no vote for procedural purposes).

However, a second vote was held on February 13, and Mayorkas was impeached in a 214–213 vote. He became just the second cabinet member, after William Worth Belknap in 1876, to be impeached by the House. On April 16, 2024, the articles of impeachment were sent to the Senate, and the following day the trial convened. Democrats claimed that the charges were unconstitutional, and they quickly moved to end the proceedings. In two party-line votes, both charges were dismissed.