Border SecurityHouse Republicans Impeach Mayorkas Over Border Policies

The figures do not change the fact that the number of people crossing into the United States has reached record levels during the Biden administration, and crossings typically dip in January. Immigration trends are affected by weather patterns and other issues, making it difficult to draw conclusions from monthly numbers.

But the drop in crossings was a glimmer of good news for the Biden administration as House Republicans impeached Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, on Tuesday on charges of willfully refusing to enforce border laws. (Their first attempt ended in defeat.)

The figures also amounted to a respite for some large American cities grappling with the burden of sheltering migrants during the wintertime.

In New York City, which is housing more than 65,000 migrants in hotels, shelters and tents, the number of migrants entering the city’s care over the last month plunged to about 1,600 per week, down 55 percent from 3,600 per week in December.

Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams, said that migrant arrivals in the city correspond directly with border crossings. The number of migrants in city shelters has fallen by 5 percent in the past five weeks, partly because of fewer arrivals and partly because of stricter shelter limits.

Denver, another city struggling with an influx of migrants, received 3,041 in January, fewer than half as many as December’s total of 6,824, according to official data. Only 13 migrants arrived in the city on Feb. 13, compared with 26 on Feb. 12, the data showed.

“If this year’s influx of migrants happens as last year’s, it will come in waves. Those down shifts will be crucial to the city of Denver to get a break, learn how to manage its resources and batten down the hatches for what comes next,” said DJ Summers, director of policy and research at the Common Sense Institute in Denver.

Many of the migrants arrived in Democratic-led cities like Boston, Denver, Chicago and New York after traveling on buses sent by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who argues that cities far from the border should share the burden of migrants in his state. Democratic mayors have accused him of using human beings as props.

Troy A. Miller, the acting head of the border agency, said the drop in border crossings is the result of “seasonal trends, as well as enhanced enforcement efforts” by Border Patrol and “our international partners.”

In late December, Mr. Biden sent Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and other top American officials to Mexico City, where they met with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to find a way to slow the surge in illegal crossings.

Since that meeting, Mexico has been intercepting some migrants traveling north to the United States, according to Jennifer Piper, program director for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that operates in Mexico.

The United States has also stepped up pressure on countries like Panama and Guatemala to take measures to prevent migrants from advancing toward Mexico.

Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, said the dip in numbers was likely connected to a few factors. Among them were rumors that U.S. officials were going to close the border in December; another was Mexico’s stepped-up enforcement, including by taking migrants off trains headed to the southern border and boosting checkpoints.

Mr. Isacson also noted that border crossing numbers regularly fall from December to January.

“It seems to be a combination of weather (rainy in the south, bitter cold at night at the border), plus people don’t like to leave home during the end-of-year holidays unless they have absolutely no choice,” he said.

Immigration has taken on enormous political importance as this year’s presidential election approaches. Mr. Biden has blamed his predecessor and putative challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, for undermining a bipartisan immigration deal in Congress that would crack down at the border.

And immigration experts say they expect another rise in numbers soon.

Casa Alitas, a Catholic agency that runs several shelters in Tucson, said numbers have been steadily climbing again.

In October, November and December, the shelter network was receiving about 1,000 migrants each day. That number plummeted to an average of about 500 daily in the first three weeks of January. This week, numbers were in the 1,000 range again.

Diego Piña Lopez, the agency’s director, said the numbers had gone up “slowly but surely.”

Andy Newman and Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting from New York.

The day after President Johnson was impeached, in February 1868, the articles of impeachment were delivered to the Senate by Representative Thaddeus Stevens, Republican of Pennsylvania. Mr. Stevens was so ill that he had to be carried through the Capitol.

Once the articles are delivered, the Senate, acting as a High Court of Impeachment, would schedule a trial during which senators would consider evidence, hear witnesses and, ultimately, vote to acquit or convict. They could also vote to dismiss the charges.

The Senate trial

The House speaker names impeachment managers from the chamber who would be tasked with arguing the case against the impeached official, serving as the prosecution team in the Senate trial.

In the case of Mr. Mayorkas, the impeachment articles also appoint 11 impeachment managers. The group includes Representatives Mark E. Green of Tennessee, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee that drew up the charges, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who has led the drive to seek his removal. Also part of the team are Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ben Cline of Virginia, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Andrew Garbarino of New York, Michael Guest of Mississippi, Harriet M. Hageman of Wyoming, Laurel Lee of Florida, Michael McCaul of Texas and August Pfluger of Texas.

The Biden administration would have the right to have an agent or attorney appear to answer for the articles of impeachment against Mr. Mayorkas. That includes appointing House Democrats to serve on the defense team.

In a trial, senators would sit as a jury in judgment of Mr. Mayorkas. For many, it would be the third impeachment trial they would sit through, after two consecutive impeachment trials of former President Donald J. Trump, in 2020 and 2021. Eventually, senators would take a vote on the charges. They could agree to dismiss the articles or render a verdict.

The verdict

If a trial moves forward without the charges being dismissed, a two-thirds majority would be required to convict and remove Mr. Mayorkas, an exceedingly unlikely outcome given that Democrats control the Senate. Democrats have the majority, holding 48 seats and the votes of three independents who caucus with them. Senate Republicans are in the minority, controlling 49 seats. If Democrats held together in support of him, Mr. Mayorkas would be acquitted even if every Republican voted to convict.

If he were to be found guilty, according to Article II, Section Four of the Constitution, Mr. Mayorkas would be removed from his position and the Senate could vote to bar him from being able to hold office again.

The G.O.P. contends that the secretary’s failure to uphold certain aspects of immigration law is itself a constitutional crime. But the president and his administration have wide latitude to control the border, and Mr. Mayorkas has not exceeded those authorities.

Still, Republicans insist they are within their rights under the Constitution to hold Mr. Mayorkas personally responsible for policy failures at the border.

“For three years, Secretary Mayorkas has willfully and systemically refused to comply with the laws enacted by Congress,” Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement after the Homeland Security Committee approved the impeachment articles.

“Make no mistake, Secretary Mayorkas’s lawlessness is exactly what the framers of our Constitution designed impeachment to remedy. The historical record makes it clear — Congress holds impeachment power to hold accountable public officials who refuse to do their duty, and to deal with grave harms to our political order.”

Then the House moved on to a second vote Mr. Johnson had orchestrated, on a $17.6 billion aid package for Israel that he knew would not muster the votes it needed to pass.

It also failed.

The back-to-back defeats highlighted the litany of problems Mr. Johnson inherited the day he was elected speaker and his inexperience in the position, roughly 100 days after being catapulted from the rank and file to the top job in the House. Saddled with a razor-thin margin of control, and a deeply divided conference that has proved repeatedly to be a majority in name only, he has struggled to corral his unruly colleagues and made a series of decisions that only added to his own challenges.

The next day, Mr. Johnson was sanguine, painting the dysfunction as the kind of messy democratic process the founding fathers had envisioned.

“The job will be done and we’re going to govern,” he told reporters just off the House floor. “This country is the greatest country in the history of the world. The entire world is counting upon us. We have steady hands at the wheel. We’ll get through it. Everybody take a deep breath. It’s a long game.”

The scene that unfolded on the House floor last Tuesday night prompted widespread bafflement among Republicans, who had assumed that Mr. Johnson had pressed ahead with the impeachment vote because he was sure he had the votes to pass it.

“I played by every rule that the party has put in place for how we should not surprise them for a vote,” said Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, one of three Republicans who broke with the party to oppose the move. “We barreled ahead with a vote. We did not need to embarrass ourselves. We could have simply waited until the math was different and gone ahead.”

It appeared that Republican leaders miscalculated both the intensity of opposition to the measure among defectors, as well as the number of Democrats who would be present to vote.

Kayla Guo and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.

The G.O.P. argues that the secretary’s failure to uphold certain aspects of immigration law is itself a constitutional crime. But in the United States, the president and his administration have wide latitude to control the border, and Mr. Mayorkas has not exceeded those authorities.

Here’s a look at the holes in the impeachment case against him.

The government has broad authority over how and when to detain migrants.

The impeachment articles that the committee approved accuse Mr. Mayorkas of flouting several provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that say deportable migrants “shall be detained” until they can be removed from the country. The articles charge that the secretary pursued a “catch and release” scheme to allow inadmissible migrants into the United States, knowing that it would be difficult or even impossible to ensure they would later appear in immigration court for removal proceedings.

What the charges do not take into account, however, is that Mr. Mayorkas also has the legal authority to determine which migrants to prioritize for detention, given limited bed space and long backlogs in the immigration courts.

“Congress loves passing laws that are impossible to execute,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, adding that enforcing detention mandates is often “a question of resources.”

The United States has not had enough detention beds to accommodate the number of migrants awaiting removal proceedings for several years, well before President Biden took office. Even the Trump administration released migrants into the country, because the maximum detention capacity — about 55,000 in 2019 — was not enough to accommodate the number of arrivals seeking entry. Former President Donald J. Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy requiring some migrants to wait for their immigration court dates outside the United States, which Republicans want to reinstitute, did not apply to all migrants making claims at the border.

Parole powers allow migrants to live and work temporarily in the United States.

One of the impeachment articles says Mr. Mayorkas “paroled aliens en masse in order to release them from mandatory detention,” again with the intent of undermining the law.

But the immigration act gives the executive branch parole power to let migrants temporarily live and work in the United States for humanitarian reasons, or if their admission would be to the public’s benefit. Decisions about whom to parole are to be made on a case-by-case basis, and there is no restriction as to what criteria the secretary can consider when determining who qualifies. There is also no statutory cap on how many migrants can be allowed into the country under the authority.

Several past administrations, including those of former Presidents Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have relied on parole authority to bring members of certain vulnerable migrant groups into the United States.

The Biden administration has built on existing programs allowing nationals of certain economically ravaged Central and South American countries with sponsors already in the United States to seek parole. It has also inaugurated similar pathways for Afghans and Ukrainians fleeing war, and introduced a mobile app known as C.B.P. One to streamline migrants through ports of entry.

House Republicans have sought to close down those avenues, passing legislation last year that would shutter nearly all of them.

Mr. Mayorkas has tussled with Republicans over what constitutes “operational control” of the border.

House Republicans have also charged Mr. Mayorkas with lying under oath about the state of the border when he testified in 2022 that the department had “operational control.” He later explained that he was using a definition employed by the Border Patrol that defines “operational control” as “the ability to detect, respond and interdict border penetrations in areas deemed as high priority.” But that differs from the standard in a 2006 law called the Secure Fence Act, which defines the term as the absence of any unlawful crossings of migrants or drugs.