House Republicans failed to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a contentious vote Tuesday that will temporarily spare the Cabinet official from facing removal proceedings.

Lawmakers voted by a narrow margin of 214-216 to reject the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, who was confirmed by the Senate in February 2023 to lead the department’s 260,000 employees.

GOP Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Tom McClintock (R-CA), Blake Moore (R-UT), and Ken Buck (R-CO) were the only members to break with the party and vote in defense of Mayorkas. All Democrats voted against the impeachment articles.

“He’s guilty of aiding and abetting the complete invasion of our country by criminals, gang members, terrorists, murderers, rapists, and over 10 million people from over 160 countries into American communities all across the United States,” Greene said during a floor speech ahead of the vote.

Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX), who was the first lawmaker to introduce a bill to impeach Mayorkas in January 2023, said the impeachment was “richly deserved.”

“We must fire this bum, this second coming of Benedict Arnold, forthwith,” Fallon said on the floor.

Since Biden took office, more than 7.5 million illegal immigrants have been encountered attempting to enter the U.S., and 6 million of that figure entered illegally between ports of entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. The Biden figure far exceeds the number of illegal immigrants encountered during the Trump administration’s four years and the Obama administration’s eight years combined.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a leader in the impeachment effort against former President Donald Trump, validated Republicans’ point that the United States faces “serious challenges” at the border but lambasted the impeachment proceedings as politically motivated.

“This impeachment is baseless, unconstitutional, and should be defeated,” Schiff said during floor debate Tuesday.

However, the GOP waited until the start of an election year to attempt to strip him of his title. 

Ahead of the vote Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security accused House Republicans of playing politics by focusing on Mayorkas’s work rather than working collectively with Democrats on a border security bill that the Senate has labored over since last October.

“This farce of an impeachment is a distraction from other vital national security priorities and the work Congress should be doing to actually fix our broken immigration laws,” DHS said in a statement. “They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas.”

House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) and ranking Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) laid out their arguments ahead of the vote during the floor debate.

“For nearly a year, the House Committee on Homeland Security conducted a thorough, fair, and comprehensive investigation into the causes, costs, and consequences of the border crisis,” Green said. “We found that Secretary Mayorkas’s willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law and his breach of public trust are responsible for this historic crisis.”

Republicans have alleged that although Mayorkas has not committed a statutory crime, he has blown up parole programs to admit illegal immigrants en masse when that outcome was not the intention of the law.

Democrats repeatedly questioned the legal grounds for the impeachment. They charged Republicans with waging a politically driven show during an election year over nothing more than differences in opinion on immigration issues.

“I’m very confused because our Republican colleagues have presented zero evidence for impeachment,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, during debate Tuesday afternoon. “This could be the first time in American history an impeachment will go to the floor of the United States House of Representatives with no evidence, no proof, no elements of a crime, nothing at all.”

Greene rebutted Democrats and attempted to link Mayorkas’s performance to the fentanyl epidemic based on the number of overdose deaths.

“Breaking our laws is more than just policy differences,” Greene said. “Three hundred dead Americans every day from fentanyl poisoning is more than just a policy difference; it’s murder.”

DHS has argued that its agency, CBP, has seized more fentanyl at the border year over year, including in 2023, and that rising seizures are evidence of its success in preventing the drug from entering the country from Mexico.

The last Cabinet official to be impeached by the House was Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876.