Rep. Al Green filed articles of impeachment against President Trump at 8:57 in the morning on Monday, August 24. The ground is immigration enforcement, and the resolution names four people killed by ICE and Border Patrol officers this year. It has one sponsor, no cosponsors, and it is sitting in a committee run by Jim Jordan.

Green is also finished in Congress. Houston Democrats voted him out in a May runoff. He leaves office on January 3, 2027, which is 130 days from today.

What H.Res.1486 actually charges

The resolution is short on counts and long on argument: one article of impeachment organized under four headings, running 19 pages in the Government Publishing Office's print and 27 in the signed copy Green posted himself. It was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary four minutes after he filed it. The bill status record lists exactly one sponsor, Rep. Al Green of Texas, and contains no cosponsor entries at all.

Green sent Trump a letter the same morning telling him it had been filed. It is worth reading, because it is the only place he concedes the obvious. "I am well aware of the fact that you will be defended by persons who will say, 'The House won't impeach, and if it did, the Senate won't convict,'" he wrote in the communiqué posted on his House site. His answer is that a failed resolution still puts disapproval on the record. He signs off, in a postscript, as "your unbought, unbossed, unafraid, unelected, liberated Democrat."

Is this really the ninth? Count them yourself

The Western Journal put the figure at "no less than nine times." Other outlets said the fourth of this term, or the fifth overall. The printed record settles it, and the answer depends on whether you count the two he co-filed with somebody else.

Resolutions where Green is the sole sponsor, all of them titled some version of impeaching Donald John Trump: H.Res. 646 on December 6, 2017; H.Res. 705 on January 19, 2018; H.Res. 498 on July 17, 2019; H.Res. 415 on May 15, 2025; H.Res. 537 on June 24, 2025; H.Res. 939 on December 10, 2025; and now H.Res. 1486. That is seven.

Add the two that Brad Sherman of California filed with Green's name on them, H.Res. 438 in July 2017 and H.Res. 13 in January 2019, and you get nine. Both cover pages read "Mr. SHERMAN (for himself and Mr. GREEN of Texas)." So nine is defensible. Seven is the number where Green wrote the thing and put his name at the top alone. His own office's impeachment page, which has not been updated since 2020, lists the first three and dates his opening floor speech on the subject to May 17, 2017, four months into the first term.

The House has voted on five of them, and the trend is not going Republicans' way

Five of the seven reached the floor and forced a vote, and all five were killed by a motion to table. The tallies, from the Clerk's own recorded votes: 364 to 58 in December 2017, 355 to 66 in January 2018, 332 to 95 in July 2019, and 344 to 79 in June 2025 on the resolution over the strikes on Iran.

Then December 11, 2025 happened. The motion to table H.Res. 939 carried 237 to 140, with 47 members voting present. Republicans still went 214 to 0 for tabling. Democrats went 23 yes, 140 no, 47 present. Eight years earlier only 58 Democrats had been willing to keep an Al Green impeachment alive. That is the number worth watching, not the outcome.

The 47 present votes were not an accident. Hakeem Jeffries, Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar announced it in a joint statement before the vote. "Impeachment is a sacred constitutional vehicle designed to hold a corrupt executive accountable for abuse of power, breaking the law and violating the public trust," they wrote. "None of that serious work has been done ... Accordingly, we will be voting 'present' on today's motion to table the impeachment resolution as we continue our fight to make life more affordable for everyday Americans."

Read that again. Leadership would not vote to kill it and would not vote to advance it. They wanted the impeachment question kept warm without owning it. That is a midterm posture, not a constitutional one.

The arithmetic, which is the whole story

The House Press Gallery's party breakdown currently lists 218 Republicans, 212 Democrats, 1 Independent and 4 vacancies, which leaves 431 seats filled. Impeachment takes a simple majority of members present and voting, so the number Green needs is 218 on paper and could be as low as 216 with the vacancies. He has one vote, his own. H.Res. 1486 has zero cosponsors as of this writing.

It is also in the wrong room. The Judiciary Committee is chaired by Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is not going to mark up articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. H.Res. 939 got a floor vote the day after Green filed it. This one went to committee instead, and the Clerk's record shows no other action on it. The House is in a district work period with the next votes expected Monday, August 31. As of now there is no public statement from Green saying he will force a floor vote, and no statement from Jeffries or anyone else in Democratic leadership about the filing at all.

The White House did respond. "This type of garbage is contributing to our law enforcement officers facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them," spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. "Al Green should be thanking President Trump and our law enforcement for delivering the largest decrease in violent crime in American history." Neither figure in that statement is sourced, and Fox reported that DHS, ICE and CBP did not respond to its questions.

Green is not retiring. His own party fired him

The "lame duck" label gets used loosely, so here is what happened. Texas Republicans redrew the map, Green's district changed under him, and he ran in the new 18th against Christian Menefee, a 38-year-old who had won the seat in a January special election. Neither cleared 50 percent in the March primary. On May 26 the runoff went to Menefee, ending a House career that began in January 2005. Green is 78. He has represented the 9th District for 21 years.

So the man filing impeachment articles in the last week of August was rejected in May by the most Democratic electorate in Houston. He is not writing this for a caucus or a floor vote. He says so himself in the letter to Trump: "it is better to stand alone than not stand at all."

Four people are named. Here is what is actually established

This is the part that deserves care, because the four names in the resolution are four real dead people, and because no officer in any of these cases has been charged with anything. Presumption of innocence applies to every one of them.

Renée Nicole Good, 37, was shot in the head by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on January 7. She was a U.S. citizen born in Colorado, a mother of three and a published poet, and she had dropped her six-year-old at school shortly before. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said there was "nothing to indicate that this woman was the target of any law enforcement investigation." DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the officer fired "fearing for his life." Then-Secretary Kristi Noem called it an act of self-defense and said an officer "acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him." Trump wrote on Truth Social that the driver "viciously ran over the ICE Officer." Bystander video reviewed by PBS News shows the shooting officer crossing in front of the car as it reversed away and appearing to be knocked backward without being struck. John Sandweg, acting ICE director under Barack Obama, warned against a rush to judgment on both sides and called the DHS statement "particularly irresponsible." The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was cut out of the investigation and the FBI took sole control. The officer has never been officially named.

Alex Pretti, 37, an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, was shot in Minneapolis on January 24 at a protest. This one was Customs and Border Protection, not ICE. Gregory Bovino, then Border Patrol commander at large, said at a January 25 news conference that "the agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted," and that "fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, a Border Patrol agent fired defensive shots." Stephen Miller first called Pretti "a would-be assassin," then said later that week that CBP officers "may not have been following" protocol. ProPublica identified the two agents from government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and CBP officer Raymundo Gutierrez. The government has never confirmed those names. DHS placed them on leave and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division opened an investigation. Bovino was removed from his command and reassigned to El Centro, California.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was shot by an ICE officer in Houston's East End on July 7 while driving three men to a construction job. He was from Mexico, had lived here roughly 35 years and had three U.S. citizen children. ICE said it was a targeted enforcement operation and that he "weaponized his vehicle," rammed an ICE car and tried to run over an officer who fired in self-defense. Attorney Hugo Balderas, representing surviving passengers, disputes that account. There is no video, because DHS told Houston Public Media the officers were not wearing body cameras, which it blamed on lapses in federal funding. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare is running his own investigation and says DHS has refused to identify the shooter.

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 26, a Colombian national, was shot by an ICE officer in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13. ICE said it had been surveilling the last known address of an alien with a final order of removal, that it tried to stop a vehicle leaving the residence, and that "the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon." The Guardian reported that DHS's own inspector general opened a case because a firearm was discharged, and that Durán Guerrero was the eleventh person fatally shot by federal immigration officers since January 2025 and the fifth killed while driving. ICE reportedly ordered a halt to most vehicle stops the next day. Trump publicly reversed that within a day, in a post the resolution quotes: "We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.'s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!"

Four killings, four self-defense claims from the government, four disputes about whether a vehicle or a weapon was actually a threat, and zero criminal charges. Two of the four have an open federal review. One has a county prosecutor who cannot get a name out of Washington.

The part conservatives should not wave away

Green's resolution is a partisan document written by a member with nothing left to lose, and it asserts as fact things that investigators have not concluded. It calls all four killings "unjustified" before any investigation has produced a public finding, and it says Trump personally covered them up without producing a document that shows him doing it. That is a real defect, and the honest word for it is prejudgment.

The oversight complaint underneath it is still real, and Republicans have said so out loud. Sen. John Curtis of Utah wrote that "we must have a transparent, independent investigation into the Minnesota shooting," and that those responsible, "no matter their title," must be held accountable. That is not Al Green talking. Federal officers in Houston were working without body cameras. A Harris County DA cannot get a shooter's name. Two of the four officers were identified by a newsroom rather than by the agency that employs them. Green also quotes an opinion by U.S. District Judge William G. Young of Massachusetts, who wrote that masks "are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan," and that "in all our history, we have never tolerated an armed, masked secret police."

None of that requires you to think Trump should be removed from office. It does require conservatives who spent years arguing that federal law enforcement was unaccountable and hostile to the people it polices to notice when the badge changes hands. Accountability is either a principle or it is a team sport.

What happens next, which is nothing

H.Res. 1486 sits in Judiciary and stays there. Green leaves in January. NOTUS reported that Jeffries told a CNBC summit in June that impeaching Trump would not be a focus for his party if Democrats take the majority after the midterms, and this filing did not change that. PatriotAddict reported today that ICE booked a record number of arrests in July, and on Sunday that the agency is pulling airline passenger data to make arrests at airport gates. The enforcement machine Green wants to impeach the president over is accelerating, not slowing down.

The useful thing in this filing is not the impeachment. It is the number 140. In 2017 a Green impeachment resolution drew 58 Democratic votes against tabling and looked like a one-man show. Last December it drew 140, with leadership hiding behind "present." If Democrats take the House on November 3, the arithmetic on this stops being a joke and starts being a whip count. Al Green will not be there to see it.

Hero image: Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, in his official congressional portrait. File photo, U.S. Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.