During five hours of testimony before the powerful House Judiciary Committee, the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, was turned into a punching bag by Republicans who are fiercely critical of President Biden’s border policies. This hearing took place as Republicans grow increasingly likely to pursue Mr. Mayorkas’s impeachment for alleged malpractice on the Southern border. 

The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Congressman Jim Jordan, called for the hearing during what is already a busy summer for his committee, which has also been probing alleged corruption involving the Biden family and the “weaponization” of the FBI and Department of Justice against conservatives and religious groups. 

As for the border, “the Biden administration’s policies have led to more national security threats,” Mr. Jordan said at the beginning of the hearing. “The Biden administration policies make it less likely — less likely — that enforcement actions will be taken against criminal aliens.”

“I know that today Secretary Mayorkas is going to try to paint a rosy picture of this disastrous mismanagement of our border,” he continued. “But the numbers don’t lie … this administration has abandoned any semblance of border security and immigration enforcement.”

Mr. Mayorkas, in facing Mr. Jordan’s and his colleagues’ withering criticisms, tried to turn the conversation away from the woes at the border and toward some of what he argued are his tenure’s successes, including his focus on stopping fentanyl from entering through ports and ground entryways. 

“We seized nearly 2 million pounds of narcotics in the last fiscal year,” Mr. Mayorkas told the committee. Undercover operations “stopped nearly 10,000 pounds of fentanyl from [entering] the U.S., led to 284 arrests, and yielded invaluable insights into the transnational criminal organizations wreaking this death and destruction.”

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, of the 107,081 drug overdose deaths in America in 2022, nearly 70 percent were a result of synthetic opioids, the vast majority of which involved fentanyl. 

Another topic that took up time at the hearing was the homeland security department’s involvement with social media companies. One of the leading committee Republicans, Congressman Mike Johnson, grilled Mr. Mayorkas on why his department is allegedly instructing social media platforms how to police their own content. 

Mr. Johnson brought up a case that held that the Biden administration was illegally colluding with social media platforms to remove some posts from websites and apps, Missouri v. Biden. Mr. Johnson questioned Mr. Mayorkas on why he created the agency that is involved in these efforts, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency 

“Who determines what is false?” Mr. Johnson asked about the agency. “Who determines what is false in your agency? If you’re going to pull something off the internet and collude with a social media platform to make sure Americans don’t see it, who determines what’s false?” Mr. Mayorkas simply said that his department is not doing what it has been accused of doing. 

The Judiciary Committee isn’t the only body going after Mr. Mayorkas. The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Congressman Mark Green, has launched an investigation into the secretary’s so-called dereliction of duty in not controlling the flow of migrants across the southern border. 

“Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been willfully derelict in his duties as secretary of homeland security,” Mr. Green said at a press conference announcing the start of his committee’s investigation in June. “He has disregarded his oath to the Constitution by ignoring the basic tenets of that Constitution.”

“What we know right now is that Secretary Mayorkas has either violated or subverted at least 10 laws passed by the United States Congress,” Mr. Green continued. “He has ignored multiple court orders to cease and desist his activities. The blatant disregard for the Constitution of the United States, which states that the United States Congress passes the laws and the executive branch executes those laws, is just scratching the surface of the harm Secretary Mayorkas’s dereliction of duty has done to our country.”

Mr. Mayorkas has drawn criticism from the GOP side of the aisle since he was sworn in back in 2021. Over the course of his tenure, he has been center stage for a number of high-profile department failures, such as the murder of several American citizens at the hands of a cartel in Mexico, as well as the surge in border crossings (which have receded dramatically in recent months, something for which the Biden administration has sought to take credit) and the implementation of Title 42. 

Articles of impeachment were drawn up against Mr. Mayorkas twice since the beginning of his tenure, but the then-Democrat-controlled House ignored the articles outright and Republicans, since assuming the majority, have not fully unified around the idea — yet. The most recent effort, led by Congressman Andy Biggs, has the support of dozens of House GOP legislators.