Kamala Harris says US-Mexico border situation is ‘tough’ but claims progress
Kamala Harris described the situation as “tough” at the US-Mexico border where migrants are being held in detention and routinely expelled before their pleas for sanctuary can be heard, as on Friday she made her first visit there as vice-president.
In El Paso, west Texas, she met with five girls, aged between nine and 16, who had been held at a Customs and Border Protection processing center after crossing the border.
She then visited the border itself at the nearby Paso del Norte port of entry, across from the Mexican city of Juárez, where there are frequently scenes of misery and chaos as people huddle in peril there and at other points along the border, waiting for a chance to be allowed to make a legal case to be in the
US.
“We inherited a tough situation,” Harris said during a meeting with faithbased organizations, as well as shelter and legal service providers.
She added: “In five months we’ve made progress, but there’s still more work to be done.”
She is tasked with addressing causes of migration, particularly from Central America, which range from violence, poverty and corruption to climate change.
“The stories that I heard today rein
force the nature of those root causes,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is looking into conditions for migrant children at the Fort Bliss army base in El Paso, it was announced during Harris’s journey to the border, amid testimonials presented in court that conditions are desperate.
Symone Sanders, Harris’s spokeswoman, told reporters aboard Air Force Two en route that Joe Biden and Harris “have instructed [homeland security secretary Xavier] Becerra to do a thorough investigation” of the conditions where children are being held in tents at the military facility.
“The administration is taking this very seriously. Extremely seriously,” Sanders said.
However, a White House spokesman later sent a statement that conditions at Fort Bliss had improved and that: “HHS [the health and human services department] has already been looking into [the] facility on their own. At no time did The White House recommend a probe of the facility.”
Harris faced the most politically challenging moment of her vice-presidency during her visit, as part of her role leading the Biden administration’s response to recent increases in families and unaccompanied children migrating across the US-Mexico border.
Harris was asked by a reporter why “right now was the right time” to make her first trip to the border.
She replied that it was not her first trip, although it is her first trip as vicepresident and since Joe Biden put her in charge of solving immigration and migration problems.
After taking questions, Harris was briefed by border patrol on the agency’s efforts to computerize records to speed up processing of migrants’ legal cases. Many are seeking asylum from human rights violations, and children, in particular, aim to reunite with family members already in the US while their cases are dealt with.
Harris did not visit the secure facilities at Fort Bliss. Last month, Becerra announced he was walking back plans to house thousands of children younger than 12 there, after Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists protested that the facility did not meet basic child welfare standards.
The temporary shelter is one of a dozen or so makeshift sites the government set up to provide more capacity beyond the traditional, licensed shelters that the health and human services department oversees.
The vice-president has faced bipartisan criticism for declining to make the trip thus far , as well as remarks on her trip to Guatemala, when she starkly spelled out the Biden administration’s message to those seeking sanctuary in the US: “Don’t come.”
Those comments “reinforced the years of attacks on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers by the previous administration”, Dylan Corbett, the director of a local non-profit organization that focuses on immigration policies and aiding migrants in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, told the Guardian.
With Donald Trump visiting the area less than a week after Harris and the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, making increasingly rightwing remarks about immigration, Republicans will be watching the vice-president’s visit closely for fodder for further attacks.
Aside from party politics, CBP, the federal agency, recently reported nine deaths of migrants along the border just in the El Paso sector, but said they were only reporting the number of deaths where agents find the deceased individual or are involved in an emergency response. The actual number is likely to be higher.
Those are deaths such as by heatstroke as migrants trek through tripledigit desert heat, or falls from the 30thigh border wall.
“We have such little appreciation for what they’re risking to be safe, to put food on the table,” RubenGarcia, the director of the Annunciation House network of shelters in the area, said. “These people aren’t coming here because they want to put jacuzzis in their houses.”
Biden’s first few months in office have seen record numbers of migrants attempting to cross the border.
CBP recorded more than 180,000 encounters on the Mexican border in May, the most since March 2000.
Those numbers were boosted by a coronavirus pandemic-related ban on the legal facility for seeking asylum from persecution, a rule called title 42 begun by Trump and continued by
Biden that allows most people unlawfully crossing the border to be summarily expelled into Mexico, at their peril.
Harris was joined on the trip by the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin and localDemocratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar.
Escobar called El Paso the new Ellis Island, the facility in New York harbor that processed millions of migrants to the US a century ago.
Harris did not visit Fort Bliss on Friday, nor the memorial to victims of the mass shooting by a man professing hatred of immigrants, at an area Walmart store in 2019.
Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino civil rights organization, called Harris’s visit “a day late and a dollar short”.