VP Harris, the border ‘czar,’ has visited only once, and the administration is pointedly ignoring what many Americans are now calling an invasion.
VP Harris, the border ‘czar,’ has visited only once, and the administration is pointedly ignoring what many Americans are now calling an invasion.
E arlier this month, Vice President Kamala Harris made news for declaring that “we have a secure border” in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd. Of course, anyone who’s paying even the slightest attention to the situation at the southern border knows that it’s anything but secure. But Harris, despite having been appointed the Biden administration’s “border czar” in March last year, doesn’t seem to be paying attention. Why not?
The border crisis is playing a significant role in the forecasts of Democrats’ electoral woes in 2022: According to a Trafalgar pollster, “safety issues (crime, border security) are particularly driving opposition to Democrats,” Dan McLaughlin reported today. In this light, the Biden administration’s complete absence of even an attempt to appear interested in the issue seems, if nothing else, like bad politics. Harris has visited the border one time since she was tapped to deal with the crisis in early 2021. That visit, in late June 2021, came after months of haranguing from Republicans — and pleading from some Democrats — and it remains the only trip that Harris has expressed interest in taking. It has now been more than a year since the woman ostensibly tasked with solving the border crisis has even ventured down to the place where said crisis is occurring.
What’s more, it’s not even clear that Harris is still acting as the head of the Biden administration’s border policy. “Vice President Kamala Harris is supposedly the White House point on the border surge, but the issue has vanished from her schedule, the Los Angeles Times reports,” the New York Post editorial board wrote in late May. “She hasn’t hosted an immigration event in nine months.” That Los Angeles Times tracker of Harris’s schedule has since been updated to show a small handful of meetings about immigration in June this year, but they appear as a blip in a sea of VP activity that spans almost a full year.
Her inattentiveness is certainly not for lack of things to do on the border. In response to Harris’s “secure border” claims, the Daily Signal noted, “When Donald Trump was president, the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2019 did not encounter a single individual on the terrorist watch list trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border between legal ports of entry. In the first 10 months of this fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol encountered 66 of them.”
In October 2021, the New York Times reported that “migrants were encountered 1.7 million times in the last 12 months, the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960.”
And “in the months following her appointment on the issue and subsequent June 25 visit, activity at the southern border experienced a historic surge,” Newsweek wrote in late November. “From February (around the time Biden and Harris took office) up until July, the number of reported encounters at the southwest border increased each month, peaking at over 213,000 confrontations.”
Again, this isn’t just bad for the country — it’s bad politics. An NBC News poll conducted earlier this month found that 68 percent of Americans believe that the country is “off on the wrong track,” compared with 27 percent who believe it’s on the right track. And 16 percent of those polled — tied for second place behind “economy/inflation” — cited “border control/illegal immigration” as the top reason for their concern. “Note that among those who believe the country is on the wrong track, more blame illegal immigration and the border than ‘Joe Biden’ and ‘gas prices’ (tied at 14 percent among wrong-track respondents), ‘crime/violence/killings’ (13 percent), and ‘women’s reproductive rights debate’ (5 percent),” Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies wrote of the poll. “Not surprisingly, the president receives low marks on his handling of immigration in that poll. Thirty-six percent of those polled approved of Biden’s handling of immigration, compared to 54 percent who disapproved.”
And despite progressive outrage at the use of the term “invasion” to describe what’s happening at the southern border, an NPR/Ipsos poll published last month found that a majority of Americans now agree with the framing: “With migrant apprehensions at record levels, large numbers of Americans across the political spectrum describe the situation at the southern border as an ‘invasion,’” NPR reported.
This administration has already made it abundantly clear that it’s ideologically opposed to any serious effort to get a handle on what’s happening at the border. Even small symbolic efforts will be criticized by the Democratic Party’s left flank — notably, Harris’s one and only visit to the border was the subject of attacks from progressive immigration advocates as well as conservatives. But one would think that the White House has learned, by now, that catering to the leftmost wing of the Democratic Party does not serve its broader political standing with the country. It could at least try to make a show of doing something — literally, anything — to broadcast something other than total negligence and apathy about border security, which is one of the core functions of the executive branch of the federal government. Otherwise, Americans will conclude that an invasion by illegal immigrants on our southern border is exactly what the White House wants.