It’s Kamplicated
Turns out veep is not in charge after all
President Biden’s big announcement that Vice President Kamala Harris is in charge of the crisis at the US-Mexico border was apparently the result of some “confusion” — and she is merely tasked with addressing its “root causes,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.
Psaki issued the stunning clarification less than a week after Biden told reporters that he was delegating one of the most pressing issues of his young presidency to the veep.
“The vice president of the United States will be helping lead that effort, specifically the root causes — not the border, there’s some confusion over that,” Psaki clarified during her daily press briefing Monday.
Biden and Psaki have both pointed to violence, corruption, poverty and climate change as factors driving the tens of thousands of illegal migrants north from
Central America, and argued that addressing those “root causes” will convince more would-be travelers to stay home.
Regardless of the specific focus of her border efforts, Harris is yet to begin taking meetings on the ongoing crisis.
Harris (inset) made no media appearances on any of the highly watched weekend news talk shows — even as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle made the rounds following visits to the border.
And she also had no immigration meetings or public events slated for Monday, according to her daily schedule released by the Office of the Vice President.
The vice president’s team did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The nitpicking over Harris’ precise role — as thousands of migrants continue to cross the border with little change in sight — did not sit well with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).
“The administration is looking for any excuse to justify the failure of President Biden and Vice President Harris to visit the southern border,” a Blackburn spokesman told The Post.
“They created this crisis and now they refuse to acknowledge or address it.”
Biden has said that he would visit the border “at some point,” but refused to put a hard date on when, saying during his first presidential press briefing last Thursday that he didn’t want to add to the media frenzy at the border.
Harris, too, has said that she would visit the border at some point, but also has not committed to a specific date.
“So now that Kamala Harris is in charge of the border crisis, can we finally get an answer on when she’ll visit the border? Or is she still laughing about it?” GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tweeted on Saturday, referencing Harris’ laughing response when recently asked about a border trip.
Even before the clarification of Harris’ role Monday, her assignment irked Republican leaders including McDaniel — who noted that Harris in 2018, then a senator representing border-adjacent California, had likened Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the Ku Klux Klan.
“Now that Kamala Harris is Biden’s point person on the border, she should be asked if she still thinks ICE is like the KKK and whether illegal border crossings should be decriminalized,” McDaniel wrote in another Saturday tweet.