VP Kamala Harris’ trip borders on disaster
Vice President Kamala Harris made her first foreign trip last week, traveling south of the border to Guatemala and Mexico to address the huge surge of illegal migrants at our southern border. The trip did not get off to a good start.
The landing gear on Air Force Two didn’t properly retract, forcing the vice president’s plane to return to Joint Base Andrews minutes after takeoff. “We all said a little prayer,” said the vice president as she boarded her backup plane.
And that was the highlight of her week.
The vice president met with the usual gaggle of government officials in Guatemala, including President Alejandro Giammattei. At a press event afterward, Harris had a strong message for potential border crossers.
“Do not come,” she said. Then, for good measure, she said it again. I’m pretty sure she wishes she had taken her own advice.
Both right and left jumped all over Harris for her remarkably incompetent mixed messaging and the disastrous midtrip one-on-one interview she did with “NBC Nightly News” host Lester Holt.
“The notion that the border is closed,” asked Holt. “Why should they believe you when they know people are getting in?”
To which the vice president had no answer, instead insisting she has been “working on this issue for a very long time,” which is technically true, just from the wrong side. She has spent her entire public career making the problem worse.
Kamala Harris has been a vocal advocate for sanctuary policies, first as district attorney for San Francisco, then statewide as attorney general and then as a senator. She is singularly unqualified for the job President Joe Biden has assigned her. It’s enough to cause open speculation in D.C. if she hasn’t been deliberately set up to fail.
On a nightly basis, the nation has seen video after video of thousands of unescorted children entering the country only to be crammed into the very same “cages” that horrified everyone when Donald Trump was in office. Children as young as 3, some dropped over a 14-foot-tall border fence, while others have been found in the Rio Grande or rescued after being abandoned in the desert with no food or water. About 16,000 children are currently in federal custody. If they are allowed to stay, that will only encourage more parents to hand their kids over to human trafficking cartels and hope for the best.
In April alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement caught 180,000 people illegally crossing the border.
So, how did Kamala Harris become the point person for border enforcement?
President Biden announced to the world he was ending the Trump administration’s “get tough” border policies. Having pulled the pin on the immigration grenade, he then dropped it in his vice president’s lap. It’s not that the vice president doesn’t know how to solve the problem; she doesn’t want to. Right now, Kamala Harris must be longing for the good ol’ days when all a vice president had to do was cut ribbons, attend funerals and clap in the right place at the State of the Union address. Instead, she found herself last week in Guatemala unable to explain to Lester Holt why neither she or her boss have yet to visit the southern border.
“We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border,” said Kamala Harris.
“You haven’t been to the border,” said Lester Holt.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” replied the vice president.
“Huh?” said millions of Americans.
The Biden administration claims they are focused on the “root causes” of illegal immigration; the systemic poverty, violence and corruption in Central America that continues to send so many fleeing their homes hoping for a better life for themselves and their children. This is undoubtedly true.
As noble a goal as this might be, it offers little consolation to the folks who have a nightly caravan of cartel thugs taking advantage of the hemisphere’s most desperate people in their backyards. Trying to solve our border crisis by unraveling the domestic chaos of corrupt and poverty-stricken countries is as doomed to fail as the city of Los Angeles trying to build “affordable housing” as solution to our current homeless epidemic.
“Overwhelmed and underprepared, U.S. authorities are releasing migrant families on the Mexican border without notices to appear in immigration court of sometimes without any paperwork at all,” reported the Associated Press in March.
As long as we continue to dangle the carrot of permanent residency for those who cross the border illegally, we will continue to incentivize human trafficking and other abuses. This is worse than false compassion. It’s enabling human rights abuses.
Unless President Biden reverses course and — trigger warning! — acknowledges the Trump administration policies were working — telling the hemisphere’s poor “Do not come” will fly no better than Vice President Harris’ plane.
Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. He can be reached at: Doug@ DougMcIntyre.com.