We can hear him now: “I was just following orders.”

And, by and large, we suspect he was. Yes, we suspect Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was, much like the bureaucrats of any tyrannical regime, just following orders — from his boss, Joe Biden.

After all, Biden is the guy who, during a 2019 Democrat presidential debate, invited “all those people who are seeking asylum” to “immediately surge to the border.” Biden thus bears ultimate responsibility for the five million or so illegals who’ve poured across our southern border on his watch, and it’s for this reason that the impeachment of Mayorkas must be seen as a proxy for the impeachment of Biden. This isn’t to say that Mayorkas is a fall guy — only that he’s more directly responsible and that he represents an easier lift. And it isn’t to say that House Republicans won’t one day find the stones to impeach Biden. National Review’s Andy McCarthy, in fact, has already made the case.

Still, Mayorkas has no good excuse. We don’t know specifically what sorts of things have been discussed between him and Biden during his two years at the helm, but we can be sure that this president never once said: Alejandro, we need you to step it up on the southern border. We have a humanitarian catastrophe here, and we need you to do a much better job of enforcing our nation’s sovereignty and making it clear to these migrants that they won’t be allowed into our country.

As our Nate Jackson noted back in July, this is an intentional invasion — one Biden has enabled. Only now that it’s clear he’s laying the groundwork for a reelection run in 2024 is he even pretending to take this calamity seriously. As stunning as it seems, Biden hadn’t once been to our southern border in all his years until this past weekend, when he and Mayorkas swooped into a freshly sanitized El Paso for a three-hour photo shoot.

Then it was off to Mexico City for a North American Leaders’ Summit with two fellow leftists, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Canada’s Justin Trudeau. While there, Biden got a heartfelt thank you from the Mexican president for building “not even one meter” of border wall, and the three agreed on a framework making clear that Biden’s ongoing border policy will be more of the same. As the White House press release stated in its — get this — Declaration of North America, “The leaders are determined to fortify our region’s security, prosperity, sustainability and inclusiveness through commitments across six pillars: 1) diversity, equity, and inclusion; 2) climate change and the environment; 3) competitiveness; 4) migration and development; 5) health; and 6) regional security.”

Notice that DEI is listed first. And notice that border security doesn’t even rate its own pillar. In any case, it’s bad to know that our president has his priorities in order.

Texas Republican Congressman Pat Fallon has seen enough, and he didn’t waste any time filing the paperwork for articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. In fact, he did so on January 3, the very first day of the 118th Congress, even though he had to wait until Republicans voted themselves a speaker before the filing became official.

Said Fallon: “From perjuring himself before Congress about maintaining operational control of the border to the infamous ‘whipgate’ slander against our Border Patrol agents, Secretary Mayorkas has proven time and time again that he is unfit to lead the Department of Homeland Security. His willful actions erode our immigration system, undermine border patrol morale, and imperil American national security. He must be removed from office.”

Fallon isn’t a partisan bomb-thrower, which should lend credence to his impeachment filing. Yet not everyone on the Republican side is convinced — including one of Fallon’s fellow Texans, Congressman Tony Gonzalez, whose San Antonio-area district includes 800 miles of border. “Impeachment is, ‘In case of emergency, break glass,’” he said. “It shouldn’t be a common thing. Not that DHS Secretary Mayorkas hasn’t made a lot of mistakes. And there’s clearly a lot of people upset.”

Huh? Short of a corrupt federal judge here or there, we can’t recall Republicans having impeached anyone since Bill Clinton nearly a quarter-century ago. Besides, what kind of border “emergency” is Gonzalez waiting for? His nonchalance in the face of an ongoing disaster seems nonsensical, like something Joe Biden or Leslie Nielsen might say: “All right, move on. Nothing to see here.”

Back in November, then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called on Mayorkas to resign or face impeachment when Republicans took the House. Mayorkas, though, has since made it clear that he isn’t going anywhere. Asked Sunday by ABC News whether he was prepared for the coming GOP-led investigation, Mayorkas said, “I am. I will be. And I’ll continue to do my work throughout them.”

We wonder: What “work” might that be? Perhaps hassling American citizens at the border?

We ask because while millions of people are being allowed to stream into our country illegally, actual American travelers from Los Angeles are being detained and fined thousands of dollars for using the wrong lane when returning back to the U.S. from Mexico.

Perhaps they should simply mumble a few words in Spanish and claim to be illegals.