This isn’t the form of historical past Alejandro Mayorkas needed to make.
The son of immigrants who fled Cuba and settled in Beverly Hills when he was a baby, Mayorkas was tapped in 2021 by President Biden to develop into the primary Latino head of the nation’s Division of Homeland Safety.
Many years earlier he made a fame because the nation’s youngest U.S. lawyer in 1998, main the Central District of California primarily based in Los Angeles at 38.
In current months, nonetheless, Mayorkas, 64, has discovered himself in a far much less flattering historic highlight: focused to develop into the primary U.S. Cupboard official impeached in practically 150 years.
“I knew I used to be getting into a very polarizing setting, an setting the place norms had been in jeopardy, the place civility was not all the time revered,” he mentioned of his mind-set when he grew to become secretary. “I didn’t assume this. It doesn’t rattle me, although.”
Home Republicans, eyeing chaos on the border as a path to regain management of the White Home and Senate, say Mayorkas’ failure to stop file arrivals of migrants meets the constitutional bar for impeachment of “excessive crimes and misdemeanors.”
Democrats name the impeachment effort an unlimited, politically motivated overreach, characterizing Mayorkas as a dedicated authorities servant getting used as a pawn within the 2024 presidential race.
To the shock of many, the embattled secretary on Tuesday narrowly escaped impeachment by the Home when three GOP lawmakers — together with one from California — broke ranks with their get together and joined all Democrats to vote no.
However Home Republican leaders have vowed to attempt once more, maybe as quickly as subsequent week, although the Democratic-controlled Senate is for certain to not convict and take away him from workplace.
In his first in depth, sit-down interview for the reason that vote, Mayorkas advised the Los Angeles Occasions on Thursday that he didn’t watch the impeachment proceedings. As a substitute, he was in a gathering within the San Francisco Bay Space discussing the company’s prioritization of synthetic intelligence. He broke away for a name and was knowledgeable the vote had failed.
Mayorkas, who insists he is not going to resign even when impeached, says he inherited a damaged and outdated immigration system that may’t adequately reply to what has develop into a worldwide migration disaster introduced on by violence, poverty, authoritarian regimes and local weather disasters.
He referred to as the impeachment proceedings baseless, the accusations false and blamed Congress for failing to allocate sufficient funding to handle the problem.
After devoting his life and profession to public service and legislation enforcement, Mayorkas mentioned the specter of impeachment, one of many rarest, most shameful rebukes a authorities official can face, is disappointing however has not shaken his dedication.
Respect for the legislation and repair to democracy are themes that run deep in Mayorkas’ upbringing.
As a boy in Los Angeles, Mayorkas remembers his mom encouraging him to method cops in uniform, prolong his hand and thank them. After escaping Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, American police had been, to her, an emblem of security and the rule of legislation.
Mayorkas was born in Havana. His Jewish Cuban father owned a metal wool manufacturing facility; his mom, a Jewish Romanian, narrowly survived the Holocaust when her household caught one of many final ships to Cuba.
In Beverly Hills — the place his dad and mom had been drawn due to the training system — the household lived in a two-bedroom residence earlier than later shifting to a modest residence, the place Mayorkas shared a bed room together with his two youthful brothers. They attended a neighborhood synagogue twice a yr for Excessive Holy Days and frequented El Colmao, a Cuban restaurant in Pico Union.
Mayorkas attended Beverly Hills Excessive College, UC Berkeley and Loyola Regulation College.
As a promising younger federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Mayorkas pursued the dying penalty in opposition to members of the Mexican Mafia, introduced organized crime costs in opposition to a Los Angeles road gang and prosecuted Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss for tax fraud and cash laundering.
Time within the courtroom, the place he mentioned protection attorneys lobbed heated verbal missiles at him, ready him for what was to return.
“After I was within the courtroom, and the arrows are flying, what one is representing is the reality,” he mentioned. “To need to combat to have that reality prevail is, I believed, what a privilege. And the arrows? Let the arrows come. We are going to deflect them, and break them.”
David Lash, then-chief govt officer of Wager Tzedek Authorized Providers, a nonprofit legislation agency in Los Angeles, remembers consulting with Mayorkas on a sequence of fraud instances focusing on aged individuals. “Ali,” as Mayorkas is identified to pals, was instrumental within the success of these instances, Lash mentioned.
Lash and Mayorkas, who lived 5 blocks from one another, had kids across the identical ages. They grew to become shut pals, getting collectively for yard barbecues through the years.
Mayorkas helped recruit Lash to the professional bono program at O’Melveny, the Los Angeles legislation agency Mayorkas joined after President Clinton left workplace in 2001.
Simply strolling to lunch would possibly take 20 minutes, Lash recalled, as a result of Mayorkas appeared to know each third individual on the road, and would cease to shake their fingers and ask how their households had been doing.
“I feel that comes from himself being an immigrant and dealing within the public curiosity,” Lash mentioned. “It’s so essential to him that he’s simply imbued with this respect for people who find themselves on a regular basis of us working to make a life.”
President Obama appointed Mayorkas to guide U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Providers in 2009. There he led implementation of Deferred Motion for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, this system that provided work permits and deportation protections to lots of of 1000’s of immigrants dropped at the nation as kids.
4 years later, Mayorkas was confirmed by the Senate as deputy secretary of DHS. He led the company’s response to the Ebola and Zika virus epidemics, constructed up the company’s cybersecurity capabilities and focused drug cartels.
His tenure wasn’t with out controversy. A 2015 DHS inspector normal’s report accused Mayorkas of making “an look of favoritism and particular entry” for politically related companies below a visa program that supplied a path to citizenship for rich overseas traders.
Mayorkas returned to personal apply throughout Trump’s administration as a companion at WilmerHale. However he appeared, to his pals, unhappy.
“He felt like there was unfinished enterprise there, and that he may get the job achieved,” mentioned Jim Pasco, govt director of the nationwide Fraternal Order of Police. He and Mayorkas have been pals since Mayorkas led the citizenship providers company.
Pasco mentioned Mayorkas has an actual reverence and affinity for legislation enforcement.
“His complete worldview, his complete lifestyle was actually imprinted on him in his early childhood and early maturity,” Pasco mentioned. “His household, significantly his mom, and his father, had been very, very patriotic and raised him to be patriotic and appreciative of the issues that the federal government did for them and the issues that [it] protects them from.”
Mayorkas returned to the Homeland Safety Division with Biden’s administration, confronted with the problem of undoing a lot of Trump’s insurance policies, together with journey bans for individuals from sure Muslim-majority nations, and with the aftermath of others, such because the separations of migrant kids from their dad and mom.
Mayorkas was shortly overwhelmed with the unprecedented arrival of migrants on the southern border, not simply from Central America however now additionally in better numbers from locations like China, India and Afghanistan. Republicans shortly put him, and his impeachment, of their sights after taking management of the Home in 2023.
Rhetoric in opposition to Mayorkas has turned ugly at instances. The morning of the impeachment vote, Home Homeland Safety Committee Chair Mark Inexperienced (R-Tenn.) behind closed doorways referred to as Mayorkas a “reptile with no balls” as a result of he has refused to resign, in response to Politico.
The assaults in opposition to Mayorkas have led even some conservatives to return to his protection.
Pasco’s group, the Fraternal Order of Police, despatched a letter to Congress simply earlier than the Home vote Tuesday praising Mayorkas and the partnership between the DHS and native legislation enforcement to fight the fentanyl epidemic and violent crime. The FOP, the nation’s largest police union, endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020.
Trump’s impeachment lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, urged Republicans to not “apply a double commonplace” by impeaching Mayorkas.
In a letter to his colleagues Tuesday morning, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Elk Grove) mentioned Mayorkas’ insurance policies have broken the nation, however malpractice isn’t an impeachable crime. Homeland Safety Committee members, he mentioned, “stretch and deform the Structure in an effort to maintain the administration accountable for stretching and distorting the legislation.”
Three former Homeland Safety secretaries, from Democratic and Republican administrations, mentioned the impeachment jeopardized nationwide safety and undermined the division’s mission, together with counterterrorism efforts.
And teams on the left, a few of which have stridently criticized insurance policies below Mayorkas, prolonged olive branches in assist of the secretary, one of many highest rating Latinos in authorities.
A coalition of 18 Latino-led civil rights and advocacy teams, together with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, wrote to Home Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday calling the impeachment effort a sham.
“Whereas not all his selections have been met with unanimous approval, together with from the signers beneath and different voices inside our neighborhood, we strongly urge Congress to redirect their efforts to working in a bipartisan method towards humane and efficient immigration reform that helps transfer the American individuals ahead,” the teams wrote.
On the identical time the Home was advancing impeachment proceedings in opposition to Mayorkas, the Senate launched a bipartisan $118-billion border and overseas support invoice, supported by Biden and which Mayorkas consulted on.
“The irony isn’t misplaced on me,” mentioned Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who opposed the invoice, partially as a result of it failed to incorporate a legalization part for immigrants together with so-called Dreamers, as earlier negotiations have. “Republicans can’t have it each methods,” he mentioned.
Nonetheless, Padilla mentioned working Homeland Safety is likely one of the hardest jobs in America, made even harder when Congress performs politics.
Republicans, he mentioned, “can’t deliver ahead significant options — in order that they pivot to attempting to scapegoat anyone by way of the impeachment course of.”
Occasions workers author Sarah D. Wire contributed to this report.
