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Republican senators angrily denounced Mayorkas in sometimes-personal terms during a committee hearing on the 2024 DHS budget request, pledging to hold a vote of no confidence in his leadership.
“Thousands of children are in physical danger. Danger because of what you are doing,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), shouting and shaking a finger at Mayorkas. “And if you cannot change course, you should be removed from office.”
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said he had drafted a resolution he would introduce “in the coming days” that would trigger a vote of no confidence. “You are derelict in your duties. I would be derelict to not do something about this,” Marshall told Mayorkas, saying he stood ready “to conduct an impeachment trial.”
Republican leaders in the House have also threatened to remove Mayorkas. While such proceedings would require a two-thirds majority in the Democratic-controlled Senate to oust the DHS secretary, they would drive attention to border and immigration issues that tend to favor the GOP.
Soon after President Biden took office in January 2021, his administration said it would exempt unaccompanied minors from the pandemic-era border restrictions used by the Trump administration to rapidly turn back migrants or return them to their home countries. Biden officials were soon overwhelmed as record numbers of teens and children crossed into the United States without their parents, cramming into makeshift border shelters.
U.S. law requires DHS to turn underage migrants over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees a network of temporary shelters where teens and children remain until the government can identify and screen a family member or another adult eligible to take custody. Many of the minors owe debts to smugglers and need to support family members back home, so they turn to low-wage jobs where they often work illegally.
Mayorkas defended his record throughout Tuesday’s hearing and said the Biden administration has been working to reduce illegal border crossings by creating more legal channels for migrants to come to the United States while addressing the “root causes” driving people to flee, including poverty, violence and repression.
The U.S. labor shortage has become a major engine for migration, he told lawmakers.
“We have 10 [million] to 11 million open jobs in the United States,” Mayorkas said. “I hear from employers across the political spectrum the need for labor. And that is a message that is transmitted and exploited by smugglers.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection released monthly enforcement data Monday evening showing a 25 percent increase from February to March in the number of migrants stopped by U.S. agents along the Mexico border. CBP officials attributed the increase to seasonal migration patterns.
Mayorkas told senators that DHS is preparing for a larger surge next month when the Biden administration plans to lift the pandemic-era emergency border controls known as Title 42.
Federal officials say they are hiring more staff, requesting additional airplanes for deportation flights and making room in detention centers to quickly process migrants’ cases. But officials acknowledged that major hurdles remain.
Approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants are already in the United States, and nearly half are facing deportation in immigration courts. A small fraction are ever deported. More than 1.2 million immigrants have final deportation orders, though little more than 70,000 of those orders were carried out in the most recent fiscal year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2021, to Sept. 30.
“It is extremely difficult to remove individuals” after they begin living in the United States, Tae Johnson, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which detains and deports immigrants, said Tuesday during a separate hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Homeland Security.
Johnson, who is a career ICE official and not a political appointee, acknowledged that the Biden administration had requested less funding for ICE in its fiscal 2024 budget. But he said even doubling the number of detention beds “wouldn’t put much more of a dent in this problem.”
ICE officials are so overloaded that the agency’s New York office is scheduling appointments for immigrants to face civil removal proceedings into 2033. Cities in Florida, Texas and Illinois also face significant delays.
Johnson said about 30 to 40 immigrants a month obey their deportation orders, without officials having to detain them, which he said is “better than zero,” and that it is not a crime to disobey an order to leave the United States.
“I think this is just a symptom of just how broken this system is, and yet we don’t seem to be responding to it,” said Rep. John Rutherford (R-Fla.), during the hearing. “We’re cutting resources, we’re not utilizing beds. We’re just letting people come across the border.”
Johnson said the government has “no plan to restart family detention in any way, shape or form,” when asked about reports that the Biden administration is considering plans to resume short-term immigration detention for family groups.
Child labor violations have been rising in the United States since 2015, fueled in part by labor shortages, low unemployment rates and the record numbers of underage migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the past two years.
Federal law prohibits employers from hiring people under age 18 to work in hazardous occupations such as meatpacking. Children under 16 are not supposed to work long hours or late at night.
Republican lawmakers in some states have proposed lowering the legal age to work, but others have warned that children are being exposed to dangerous equipment and suffering burns and other injuries on the job. Some youths are not even enrolling in school.
The Labor Department fined Wisconsin-based Packers Sanitation Services Inc., one of the nation’s largest food-sanitation companies, $1.5 million in February for illegally hiring more than 100 children as young as 13 to scour blood and fat from multiple meatpacking plants on overnight shifts, one of the worst cases investigators said they had ever seen.
Reuters found widespread child labor among suppliers to Hyundai Motor Co. in Alabama, and the New York Times this year found minors illegally employed in dangerous jobs all over the country, including roofing, cleaning and food production.
Labor Department statistics show that 3,876 minors were working in violation of child labor laws in fiscal year 2022, a 37 percent jump from the year before. Some 688 minors were found in hazardous occupations, a 94 percent increase since 2015.
