It’s hard to find a better example of America’s political dysfunction than the impeachment this month of Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security. Republicans are right that the country has an immigration crisis, but their grandstanding move against Mayorkas attacked the Democrat trying hardest to fix it.

Mayorkas, a feisty man with a ferocious intellect, seems almost to relish his moment in the ring. He’s been a punching bag for outrageous comments, such as Rep. Mark Green’s (R-Tenn.) slur that he’s “a reptile with no balls,” which a White House spokesman rightly called “vile” and antisemitic.

Mayorkas keeps on rolling. Some Republicans in the Senate are demanding a trial on the Feb. 13 House impeachment charges, which appear to lack any trace of the required evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and will almost certainly fail. President Biden described this charade as a “blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games.”

Buried underneath Mayorkas’s trial, however, is the deeper story of why this country can’t solve the border mess. It’s a tale in which Democrats bear nearly as much responsibility as Republicans for the inability to fix a system that is plainly broken. This account is drawn from sources in and out of government who have worked closely with Mayorkas as the train wreck of impeachment approached.

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The president started on Inauguration Day wanting to be the anti-Trump on immigration. After four years of cruel scenes at the border, Biden wanted to signal change — and to respond to Hispanic voters who had helped elect him.

Biden unfortunately threw the baby out with the bathwater. He announced a 100-day moratorium on deportations that was quickly overturned in court. He disdained physical barriers along the border that might resemble President Donald Trump’s notorious “wall.” And he shied from policies that recalled Trump’s border-closing “Remain in Mexico” stance. Politically, immigration was a loser; Biden mostly kept his distance.

That spelled trouble for Mayorkas. He took the job of running Homeland Security in 2021 knowing that a new legislative framework was needed — but unlikely to pass a sharply divided Congress. That meant DHS, lacking the necessary statutory authority or resources, would inevitably struggle with migrants claiming asylum status so they could get jobs in the United States while the overburdened system took five to seven years to process their claims.

DHS was a “catcher’s mitt,” as one of Mayorkas’s aides put it. By the time migrants arrived at the border, it was too late for good solutions. The asylum system, with its low bar of requiring only a show of “credible fear” to enter the country, leaned in favor of admitting people, and DHS officials told me that about 75 percent of such claimants get initial waivers. When their cases are finally heard by immigration judges, they said, only about 20 percent are approved.

Migrants couldn’t be blamed for crossing a broken fence. Illegal entry offered jobs and decent housing — and escape from terrible conditions back home. And it made business sense: Migrants who paid smugglers as much as $10,000 could be cleared as refugees to work in the United States for at least five years while waiting for a hearing, all the while sending money home to needy relatives. That represented a net gain for them, but it has overwhelmed some of the U.S. cities and states where they arrived.

“The fundamental problem we have is that our laws and funding shortfalls do not allow the U.S. government to screen and return people rapidly who come here as economic migrants and do not have legitimate asylum claims,” Susan Rice, who worked with Mayorkas on immigration issues when she headed Biden’s domestic policy council, told me.

Mayorkas and Rice wanted a new approach of stopping the flow before it got to the border. Biden favored it, too, in principle. But his administration didn’t get the job done, and it’s a case study in how good ideas get overwhelmed by inertia and interagency disputes.

Mayorkas urged the State Department back in 2021 to create what became known as “safe mobility centers” abroad where migrants could make their asylum claims — and get quick judgments that wouldn’t require an endless judicial review. The State Department agreed in principle, and last May promised to create 100 such centers. Nearly a year later, there are just four — in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Guatemala. They’ve helped stem flows from those countries, but migrant numbers from other places have surged.

The State Department, to be blunt, had other priorities than migration. Foreign Service officers don’t get points for helping DHS.

That was true for the Justice Department, too. Administration officials say Mayorkas made more than a dozen requests for........

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