Tom Homan: Impeach Mayorkas for the Death of Many Migrants

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testifies before a House Appropriation
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, JOAQUIN SARMIENTO/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Congress should impeach border chief Alejandro Mayorkas because of the many migrants killed by his pro-migration policies, former official Tom Homan told an informal hearing held by GOP representatives.

“The humanitarian crisis this administration created is killing people in record numbers,” Homan, a former acting chief of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, told Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) at the impeachment event on February 8.

Homan continued:

It’s not just migrants but U.S. citizens. That needs to be the overshadow of why this administration needs to be held accountable and [why] the secretary needs to be impeached … Massive amounts of people are dying — not just migrants — but U.S. citizens too.

The focus on Mayorkas’ death toll may complement other critics’ legalistic arguments for Mayorkas’ removal.

The massive death toll is an open secret among D.C.’s politicians, progressives, reporters, and pro-migration lobbies.

“We have seen too much tragedy in the oceans of the Atlantic,” Mayorkas told a press conference in Miami, Florida on January 30. “We’ve seen loved ones lose children and family members,” said Mayorkas, who rerouted migrants’ jungle path through Panama in 2022 after getting reports of many dead migrants.

“People go through … jungles and a long journey to the border,” Biden told the international media on January 10, adding:

Many are victimized, not only in terms of what they have to pay, but victimized physically in other ways. We’re trying to make it easier for people to get here, opening up the capacity to get here, but not have them go through that godawful process.

“The misery and death that people experience, only to be turned away at the border, is appalling,” said a tweet by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council.

“I have spoken with several migrants on the border between Mexico and the United States who have told me they have seen corpses dumped in the Darién jungle,” said Adam Isacson, the director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Some GOP politicians recognize the Democrats’ vulnerability on the issue. The vulnerability is expanded because many Democrats insist they are a morally superior, non-racist, pro-humanitarian party.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), for example, slammed Democrats at a February 1 hearing of the House judiciary committee:

That chart reflects the uptick in migrant deaths. That’s 2020 to 2022. Almost 1,000 migrant deaths at the southwest border of the United States. We had 53 migrants die in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio — cooked in the Texas heat. Fifty-seven were killed when a tractor-trailer crammed migrants rolled over in a highway crash in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Ask me this, is it Christian for migrants to die like that?

“Nearly 1,400 dead bodies have been found along the southern border since Biden took office — each year has been a record high,” Rep. Lauren Boebert said at a February 8 hearing.

Breitbart News has closely covered the hunger-games-style obstacle course which poor migrants — and their children — take in their gambles to win entry through Mayorkas’ erratically open border.

“There were two images of his treacherous journey north that he couldn’t get out of his head,” Albinson Linares from Telemundo.com said about a Venezuelan migrant named Johan Torres:

The first was how a [migrant] person who resisted a robbery in Mexico was killed with a machete; the other happened in the [Panama] jungle, when he saw a man leave behind his young daughter, waist-deep in mud.

“He left her there, lying in the mud and crying. And I couldn’t do anything because I was dying of exhaustion. But I can’t forget that,” he said with tears in his eyes.

“The stories we have heard from those who have crossed the Darien Gap attest to the horrors of this journey,” Giuseppe Loprete, the Panama manager for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said in a January 17 statement. “Many have lost their lives or gone missing, while others come out of it with significant health issues, both physical and mental,” he added.

“More than 1,238 lives have been lost during migration in the [north, central and south] Americas in 2021, among them at least 51 children,” said the group’s July 1 report. “At least 728 of these deaths occurred on the United States-Mexico border crossing, making this the deadliest land crossing in the world,” said the IOM statement. The statement added:

“The number of deaths on the United States-Mexico border last year is significantly higher than in any year prior, even before COVID-19,” said Edwin Viales, author of the new IOM report on migrants in the Americas in 2021. “Yet, this number remains an undercount.”

There is a growing amount of video about the ordeal and the deaths — but the deadly drama has been hidden by the soft-focus, pro-Biden, corporate evening news.

But in September 2022, CNN’s Ray Sanchez slipped this horror story into a cheerful report from Marthas Vinyard:

The couple [Pedro Luis Torrealba, and his wife said they] started the roadless crossing on the border between Colombia and Panama — the deadly Darién Gap — with more than 60 other migrants, Torrealba said outside the parish house on Thursday night. Only 22 completed the trek across the 60 miles of jungle and steep mountains, he said. Some fell from cliffs, others were swept away by flood waters.

At the Biggs event, several former homeland security officials provided much evidence of migrants killed under Mayorkas’ tenure.

“In the past 24 months, somewhere between 1,500 and 1,700 dead migrants have been counted by CBP at the border,” said Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. “That doesn’t include the number of migrants that died in Mexico on the journey or the dangerous and inhospitable Darien Gap,” he added.

Democrats, however, are trying to shift the media focus to the far fewer deaths of injured or ailing migrants in government custody. For example, Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) used the February 8 hearing to claim:

In 2020. the [Government Accountability Office] GAO said reported that border patrols currently do not have reliable information on deaths, serious injuries, and suicide attempts [in government  custody], and has not consistently reported deaths of individuals to Congress. And in 2022, the GAO again found that Border Patrol has not collected, recorded, or reported to Congress complete data on migrant deaths or disclosed associated data limitations.

 

 

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