US Senate ends impeachment of Jewish Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas
Vote along party lines puts kibosh on House’s charges that Mayorkas failed to address Mexico border crisis; Jewish groups: Allegations recall antisemitic ‘Great Replacement’ trope
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Voting along party lines, the United States Senate buried impeachment proceedings targeting the Jewish Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
All 51 senators caucusing with Democrats voted on Wednesday to adjourn the impeachment before proceedings started. All 49 Republicans voted against adjourning, with one voting present on one count of impeachment.
The vote brings to an end attempts to impeach Mayorkas over how he has handled undocumented migrants entering the US from Mexico. The impeachment in the US House of Representatives barely passed in February, 214-213 — and even then, the first vote failed. Rep. Mike Johnson, the Republican from Louisiana who is House speaker, had to bring it up for a vote a second time.
Jewish groups had expressed alarm at the impeachment process, noting repeated invocations during the impeachment hearings of the Great Replacement theory, a baseless conspiracy theory whose original version claims that Jews are behind an effort to replace the populations of majority-white countries with immigrants of color.
“This impeachment effort was nothing more than a cynical political stunt that further normalized deadly antisemitic, white supremacist ‘invasion’ and ‘replacement’ conspiracy theories,” Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a liberal-leaning community relations group, said in a statement.
A record number of migrants have been crossing the US-Mexico border recently, and Republicans charged that the border is out of control because Mayorkas is willfully ignoring existing laws. They say the situation amounts to the high crimes and misdemeanors necessary for impeachment.
Democrats said Mayorkas is carrying out White House policy, which does not meet any criminal standard, and that he has scored successes in managing the border situation.
Impeaching Mayorkas was a key political aim of former US President Donald Trump, whose campaign this year for reelection has focused on the border crisis.
Mayorkas was born in 1959 to Jewish parents in Havana, Cuba. His mother, Anita, fled to Cuba from Romania during the Holocaust; his father Charles, was born to a Sephardic Jewish family that had emigrated to Cuba from the former Ottoman Empire. The homeland security secretary’s family came to America following the Cuban Revolution in 1961.
According to the American Jewish publication Forward, Mayorkas is the first Sephardic Jew to serve in a US cabinet. (Another Sephardic Jew, Judah Benjamin — the first Jewish US senator — had served as Treasury Secretary in the southern states’ Confederacy during the American Civil War.)
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
