Vice President Kamala Harris finally visited the U.S.-Mexico border — more than three months after President Biden appointed her as his "Border Czar."
Harris visited El Paso, Texas, which is nearly 800 miles from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, which is the epicenter of Biden/Harris administration's border crisis. That's where Harris would have seen "kids in cages."
During the three months since Biden appointed her as his point person on border issues, a humanitarian crisis has turned into a humanitarian emergency/national security threat. But suddenly, just a few days before ex-President Trump will visit the Rio Grande Valley with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Harris decided to go to El Paso with ineffectual Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who keeps assuring us that the border is "closed and secure," when we can see that it isn't.
Am I being unfair to Harris by calling her out for not visiting the border before now? I don't think so because how could she possibly understand what's going on down there without witnessing that heartbreaking tragedy up close and personal? She still needs to visit the Rio Grande Valley to see what happens to unaccompanied children who show up at the border alone in the middle of the night. Trump was accused of detaining "kids in cages," but the same thing is happening under Biden, only worse.
I can understand why the Biden administration wants to treat illegal border-crossers with kindness and compassion, but its misguided "open borders" policy just invites millions more unskilled, poverty-stricken Central Americans and Mexicans to overwhelm our southern border.
Before her brief and carefully choreographed visit to El Paso, Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who represents a Texas border district, wrote to Harris, telling her that "the rapid rise in the number of immigrants arriving at our southern border has placed severe limitations on our communities. … The administration needs to take a proactive approach to create a sustainable system of humanitarian aid to relieve everyday Americans of that responsibility." Translation: Border security is a federal responsibility the Biden administration is shirking.
How bad is it along our southern border with Mexico? Well, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 530,000 illegal border crossers were apprehended between January, when Biden became president, and April, a 51 percent increase over the same period in 2020. And another 180,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the border in May, the highest monthly total in more than 20 years.
Earlier this month, Harris visited Guatemala and Mexico City, which are a long way from the border. Harris explained that she was investigating "root causes" of the border crisis, but when NBC News anchor Lester Holt asked her why she hadn't visited the border, she laughed nervously and claimed not to understand the question.
Last Tuesday, Abbott, a conservative Republican, got tired of waiting for Biden and/or Harris to address the crisis and announced that Texas would build its own border wall and crack down on illegal immigration. Abbott warned that anybody who breaches his border wall "is subject to being arrested for aggravated trespass." Now that's what I call real border security.
One of Biden's first executive orders stopped construction of Trump's famous (or infamous) border wall, thereby inviting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to come to the U.S. Congress has implored Mayorkas to hire many more CBP officers. "We're very focused on recruiting and hiring additional personnel," he replied, even as he continues to assert that the porous border is closed and secure when it obviously isn't.
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal's senior political columnist.
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