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 It was her first overseas trip, and Vice President
Harris, recently deputized to address what the White House calls “the root
causes of migration,” was in Guatemala trying to break through with a simple
message. “Do not come,” Harris told would-be migrants last June. “Do not come.
The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders.”
They did not listen, or if any migrants did hear Harris last year, many ignored
her message. Just last month, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol,
234,088 migrants were apprehended at the southern border, the highest mark ever
recorded.
Asked that same month if President Joe Biden had confidence in Harris and her
ability to handle the situation, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki
replied, “he absolutely does.” But as the flow of migrants accelerates across
the southern border, immigration has disappeared from the vice president’s
public schedule.
A compilation of that schedule by the Los Angeles Times, reviewed by
RealClearPolitics, shows that Harris has not hosted an immigration-specific
event since last summer. The last one, a meeting with Asian American, Native
Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander leaders in the White House last August, touched
briefly on immigration.
White House officials dispute any characterization that Harris’ public schedule
tells the whole story. “The vice president continues to lead implementation of
the Root Causes Strategy and has been engaging with Cabinet and other
Administration officials on this effort,” Harris’ Press Secretary Kirsten Allen
told RCP.
Addressing the challenge remains part of the vice president’s policy portfolio.
She leads top-level meetings that are not always made public, and she has taken
point in diplomatic efforts in the region. For instance, it was Harris who
traveled to Honduras for the inauguration of President Xiomara Castro in
January. Administration officials hoped to find a new ally in that executive,
someone who would help stem the flow of the millions of people heading north
through Central America to the southern border. According to an official White
House readout, Harris and Castro discussed “a broad range of issues.” Among them
migration, but also coronavirus and the economy as well as corruption and
gender-based violence.
Despite those efforts, the influx has not slowed, and Biden is expected to end
enforcement of Title 42, the pandemic policy that allowed Border Patrol to turn
away hundreds of thousands of migrants on public health grounds. Warnings from
some Democrats in border states, including Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, have gone
unheeded.
The Department of Homeland Security is bracing for more record-breaking numbers
at the border, and NBC News reports that there is concern in the department that
they won’t have enough funding to address a surge if Title 42 is lifted,
compounding a challenge that Biden has faced since the beginning of his
presidency.
As the number of interdictions started to rise and chaotic images from the
southern border flooded cable news, concern grew, even among Democrats. Biden’s
own pollsters, the New York Times reported, warned that the issue was “a growing
vulnerability." Biden still insisted that he could get the situation under
control, albeit with divine intervention.
“Is there a crisis at the border?” RCP asked the president as he walked out of
the East Room of the White House after a speech last March.
“No,” Biden replied over his shoulder. “We’ll be able to handle it,” he said
while walking side-by-side with Harris. “God willing.”
Two weeks later, the Associated Press reported at the time, Biden tapped Harris
to lead the administration efforts to tackle the migration challenge at the
southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of
the problem. Republicans were eager to assign blame and dubbed Harris “border
czar.”
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The vice president rejected that framing and sought to clarify her mission. As
the White House press secretary explained to reporters last March, Harris “will
be helping lead that effort, specifically the root causes – not the border,”
admitting that there has been “some confusion over that.”
The president was also confused: When Biden and Harris met with the
Congressional Black Caucus in April that year, he praised his vice president,
saying she would do “a hell of a job” handling immigration, according to a new
book by New York Times’ reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. But
Harris corrected him then and there, the two write. “Excuse me,” she said, “it's
the Northern Triangle – not immigration.”
Biden eventually clarified the mission. “It’s not her full responsibility,” he
later told reporters, but “when she speaks, she speaks for me.”
Whether she wanted the job or not, Harris embraced the challenge. She has made
three trips to the region, and she traveled to the southern border to hear
directly from Border Patrol. The vice president has met both with law
enforcement and migrant groups, stressing all the while that the question
“cannot be reduced to a political issue.”
Politics were there from the beginning though, and some feared that deputizing
Harris to tackle such a mammoth challenge ran the risk of unfairly saddling her
with a thankless mission for which there is no easy solution. “She is qualified
to do the job,” Chuck Rocha told RCP of Biden’s decision to turn this part of
his policy portfolio over to his vice president. Rocha helmed Latino outreach
for Sen. Bernie Sanders in both of that candidate’s presidential bids, and Rocha
credited Harris for being “a staunch advocate of the progressive wing of the
immigration movement.”
All the same, Rocha warned last year that expectations should be tempered: “It
has been an issue that we have been trying to fix for generations, one that I
don’t think any one person can totally solve.”
Biden has called on Congress to take up comprehensive immigration reform since
he got to the White House. There is no bipartisan appetite on Capitol Hill for
the bill that he sent to Congress on his first day in office. The administration
has subsequently been left to its own devices, and Harris released a 20-page
plan last July to address the problem.
“We will build on what works, and we will pivot away from what does not work,”
Harris wrote in an introduction to the plan that focuses on creating
partnerships with Northern Triangle countries to combat corruption, violence,
and poverty.
“It will not be easy, and progress will not be instantaneous,” the vice
president warned, “but we are committed to getting it right.” Biden should know.
He was deputized by then-President Obama to deal with a similar mission amid an
earlier surge of migrants, many of them unaccompanied children. On a tour of
Central and South American nations in 2014, he offered U.S. help to root out
corruption, provide economic opportunity, and ensure safety in the Northern
Triangle nations.
“We have to deal with the root causes,” Vice President Biden told reporters
gathered for a press conference in the residence of the U.S. ambassador to
Guatemala, echoing the exact phrase his administration now uses eight years
later.
Biden understands the challenge, and that tackling it without help from Congress
is arduous and thankless, if not impossible.
“I said when we became a team and got elected, that the vice president was going
to be the last person in the room,” he joked last March when he announced that
Harris would helm the mission. “She didn’t realize that means she gets every
assignment.”
“I gave you a tough job, and you’re smiling, but there’s no one better capable
of trying to organize this for us,” the president continued after the levity.
The vice president didn’t flinch. She thanked him “for having confidence in me.”
Then Harris added, “there’s no question that this is a challenging situation.”
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