When President Joe Biden charged Vice President Kamala Harris with addressing the roots of migration from countries such as Honduras and Guatemala, he made clear, speaking back in 2021, that he was asking her “to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations.”
Republicans, however, are intent on misrepresenting Harris’ task, labeling her the Biden administration’s “border czar” and falsely claiming she was charged with fixing issues at the U.S.-Mexico border. In July, House Republicans, joined by a handful of Democrats, approved a resolution that repeats the claim and falsely asserts that the increasingly militarized southern border is “open.”
“President Biden’s and Border Czar Harris’s far-left Democrat open border policies are to blame for this historic crisis,” the resolution stated.
In reality, Biden asked Harris not to fix longstanding problems at the U.S.-Mexico border, including staffing issues that have led to long delays in processing asylum claims, but to help Central American nations improve conditions so that none of their citizens felt the need to flee poverty and violence in the first place.
“The best way to keep people from coming is keep them from wanting to leave,” Biden said at the time.
“I look forward to engaging in diplomacy,” Harris herself said at the time.
Adriel D. Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, told Salon that the “border czar” charge is a false claim that stems, in part, from sloppy reporting on Harris’ job.
“There was a lot of confusion, I think, in the media, as well as from White House staff members, about what her role was,” Orozco told Salon. “But from the beginning, Vice President Harris’s diplomatic campaign was supposed to be long-term. It wasn’t really meant to address short-term border issues.”
Orozco explained that the vice president had two primary tasks: The first was to increase public and private investments in the Northern Triangle countries — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador; second, try and address the violence, corruption, and other governance issues in those countries.
At the time, a majority of people entering the U.S. were from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries, Orozco noted. That has since “changed dramatically,” he said.
“Last year, for the first time, more than 50% of those folks who were apprehended at the border were from countries other than those four countries,” the senior policy counsel said. “So people are coming from more from further away, from vastly diverse countries, than at the outset of when Vice President Harris was given this assignment.”
In December 2023, 54% of people encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border came from Venezuela and China. The increase in Venezuelan migrants went up from 6,000 the year before to 47,000. Despite the distance between China and the U.S.-Mexico border, the Border Patrol reported about 6,000 encounters with Chinese citizens — a significant increase from the 900 in 2022, Pew Research reported.
“We are living in a world where there are just historic levels of global displacement,” Orozco said.
The shift in the sources of migration to the U.S. came after Harris helped secure new economic assistance for the Americas. As NBC News reported, in June 2021 Harris traveled to Mexico to sign an agreement that would lead to a $4 million commitment in direct assistance and over $5.2 billion in private-public investments from the U.S. However, the article states that Harris hasn’t visited the southern border or the countries to its south since January 2022.
In Guatemala, the vice president emphasized the bond between the nations and offered millions in aid and investment, while in Mexico she highlighted the “interdependence and interconnection” between the country and the U.S., the Washington Post reported. The article pointed out that Harris had a far sterner tone toward plausible migrants considering a trio to the U.S. border, saying “Do not come,” during a news conference with Guatemala President Alejandro Giammattei.
“Do not come. You will be turned back,” she said, the Washington Post reported. “It can be a very treacherous and dangerous trek.”
Since Biden’s executive action in June, limiting asylum claims when there is a “surge” at ports of entry, the White House reported that the number of migrants apprehended at the border had dropped by 50% in July. Shelters on the southern U.S. border that were crowed with migrants a year ago have now been reported to be “drastically, drastically less,” according to Tiffany Burrow of the Val Verde Humanitarian Border Coalition — dropping by as much as 60% in the last few months, NBC News reported.
Harris is aware that immigration is being used as an attack, a fact her campaign sought to address in one of its first television ads. The ad blames Trump for encouraging Republicans to kill a bipartisan immigration deal that would have ramped up security and staffing at the border while highlighting Harris’ background as a prosecutor who went after transnational gangs.
“There’s two choices in this election: The one who will fix our broken immigration system,” the video states over a clip of Harris speaking at a podium. The ad then shows an image of Donald Trump: “And the one who is trying to stop her.”
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