Kamala Harris went to the border Friday for the first time as vice president, some three months after President Joe Biden put her in charge of the ongoing (and worsening) migrant crisis.
Her visit comes on the heels of a disastrous trip to Guatemala and Mexico last month — a calculated distraction from the historic surge of illegal immigration at the southwest border, which saw more than 180,000 apprehensions in May, a record for that month, and nightmarish conditions at migrant youth detention centers across the country.
Harris was criticized by both Republicans and some Democrats from border districts last month for visiting Central America and Mexico before bothering to see for herself the crisis at the border, which was unleashed by a series of executive orders and policies Biden enacted immediately upon taking office in January.
But it doesn’t really matter where the vice president goes, or when. Her trip to El Paso, like her trip to Mexico and Guatemala, is pure theater. As soon as Harris’s plane landed, the show began. Asked on the tarmac why she decided now was the right time to make her first trip to the border as vice president, Harris repeated the awkwardly obvious lie that she has “been to the border many times,” before regurgitating the absurd talking points that she had to go to Central America first to understand the “root causes” of migration.
Things didn’t improve from there. For one thing, Harris didn’t even go to the actual border. She visited a Border Patrol station about nine miles from the Rio Grande, talked to some immigration activists and legal service providers, posed for press photos back at the airport, and departed for Los Angeles before 1 p.m. Even the choice of El Paso was pure theatrics. Instead of going to the epicenter of the crisis, on the other end of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, Harris reportedly chose El Paso because that’s where the Trump administration first implemented its short-lived family separation policy. Politics, not the harsh realities on the border, was her motivation.
None of this comes as a surprise. By now we’ve come to expect cursory and substance-less border theatrics from this administration, along with reckless policy decisions like ending the “Remain in Mexico” program, which probably did more than anything else to stave off the migrant surge that was unleashed when Biden signed the order.
The thing is, Harris didn’t need to visit the border to understand the ongoing crisis there any more than she needed to visit Guatemala or Mexico to understand the “root causes” of migration. The attempt to make illegal immigration more complicated than it is has been a hallmark of the left for decades. We all know why people flee impoverished and corrupt countries to come to the United States, and we all know that if they have a reasonable chance of getting in and being allowed to stay, even if they cross illegally, they will come.
And so they have — in numbers we haven’t seen in decades. With the border now effectively under the control of powerful criminal cartels that are profiting off what amounts to industrialized illegal immigration, the stakes for the Biden administration are high, even if the vice president doesn’t know it — or, for purely partisan political reasons, refuses to act like it.
John Daniel Davidson is the political editor of The Federalist.
