Anywhere but the Border
By Anabella
Six months ago, Vice President Kamala Harris was charged with handling the escalating crisis at our southern border. You’d never know Harris was tapped for such an important role, though, seeing as she’s never once visited the border with Mexico. Sure, she’s traveled to countries in the Northern Triangle to address what she calls the ‘root’ causes of migration, such as climate change. But she’s still missing from the location that urgently demands her presence.
Border facilities are overwhelmed, strapped for resources, and U.S. Customs and Border Protections personnel are growing frustrated with a debacle that they’ve been instructed not to deal with by the White House. Some officers have considered retiring early over the Biden administration’s relaxed policies, which uphold an unofficial open border. Neglecting her duty for weeks on end, Harris has caused many to question the motive behind her inaction.
To distract from her absence at the border, Harris deflects. She consistently claims that President Joe Biden inherited the crisis from his predecessor, when it just isn’t true. The surge in border crossings coincided with Biden’s first month in office. But the cue was issued even prior when the Democratic presidential campaign flirted with open borders. As the newly elected Biden halted construction on the border wall, postponed deportations, and signaled that the U.S. would welcome thousands more refugees, the message was heard loud and clear throughout Central America. Anticipating a promise of amnesty or temporary legal status, thousands of immigrants made the treacherous journey, trusting smugglers and coyotes to navigate their passage while risking their lives and their children’s to reach the United States.
This past April, 178,600 immigrants were apprehended at the border, setting the record for the most apprehensions in a single month in 21 years. The number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border has skyrocketed from just over 11,000 in May of 2019 to almost 19,000 in March of 2021. In March, border facilities for unaccompanied minors reached upwards of 300% capacity. The fiasco at the border is almost purely a result of the new administration’s approach and attitude towards illegal immigration.
We remember Kamala Harris’s tweets decrying Trump’s conduct of the immigration issue years ago. There’s video footage of her lambasting the rhetoric discouraging Central Americans from migrating to the United States as xenophobic. Now that Harris is feeling the heat of a border crisis she helped generate, however, she has curiously reversed course, urging migrants to “not come” during her joint press conference with the president of Guatemala last week.
One tasked with tackling the southern border issue ought to acknowledge the reality and severity of the situation. Harris has yet to do so. After declaring that there is, in fact, a crisis, one should assess the circumstances by visiting the scene. Once there is a comprehensive plan to mitigate the situation, root causes might be considered as a followup step to ensure it is not exacerbated. However, the first priority should be alleviating the dangers that an open border causes. The administration should lock down the border with the same enthusiasm they locked down the country and economy during the pandemic. Harris has skipped the important steps and jumped right into discussing the contributing factors in Central America.
By prioritizing discussions with other nations, really a “grand gesture,” which she called the idea of visiting the border, Harris is attempting to paint this situation as a humanitarian crisis, when it is predominantly a national security crisis. Her feigning concern over the well being of Central American nations is the administration's America Last agenda in practice. By spending more time overseas than at the border communities, Harris spits on American sovereignty. Harris would prefer to search for imaginary causes of a disaster that she and the president in fact manufactured through terrible policy and messaging.
Harris’s apathy towards both the disastrous conditions at the border and her reluctance to fix them is most clearly depicted in her latest interview with Lester Holt. Harris is clear that she has no intention to visit the border. As Holt questions Harris about her failure to visit the border, she deflects the accusation. When Holt pressed the matter, the Vice President responded with what seemed like a bad joke, stating she’d “never been to Europe either” and that she didn’t understand the point the host was trying to make. Kamala, the point is that you’ve shirked your responsibility and are trying to pretend you haven’t. Her response was insulting and belittled the dire situation that migrants, border patrol employees, and those living in border towns face daily.
It will be interesting to see how Harris responds to mounting pressure and negative attention as it becomes more and more evident that she is egregiously mismanaging the crisis at the border. Conditions cannot improve until it is taken seriously (or even acknowledged) by the woman, and administration, supposedly in charge. This means that Harris must stop evading responsibility, stop redirecting the conversation, and for the love of all that is good, stop with her incessant and irritating cackling. After several months of avoiding a visit to the southern border, how many more days will it be until she makes her long awaited appearance?
