Republicans have attacked the Vice-President as the Biden
Administration’s “border czar,” but her remit was always to address the
root causes farther south.
Early last week, just hours after Joe Biden ended his reëlection bid,
Republican lawmakers received a stern memo from the National Republican
Congressional Committee, the Party’s main campaign arm in the House.
“Republicans have never had less time to define the presidential nominee
of our opponents,” the memo read, according to a copy obtained by Punchbowl News. “It is vital that our entire Conference is on message.” Democrats had quickly rallied around the candidacy of Vice-President Kamala Harris,
and several Republican members were already experimenting with openly
racist attack lines, calling her a “D.E.I. hire.” “I’m not going to get
into all the color stuff,” Representative Troy Nehls, a Texas
Republican, told reporters, when they asked him whether such remarks
were appropriate. Another memo, which included additional lists of
talking points, started with a more conventional subject line: “Joe
Biden & Kamala Harris’ Border Crisis.”
Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, had already announced
her plan to file an emergency resolution “condemning Kamala Harris’
role as Joe Biden’s ‘Border czar’ leading to the most catastrophic open
border crisis in history.” Many Democrats pointed out that Harris never
held such a job. The title didn’t even exist. In response, after
Stefanik drafted the resolution, she and her Republican colleagues
edited it, saying that Harris “came to be known colloquially as the
Biden administration’s ‘border czar.’ ” The rest of the resolution is
replete with falsehoods, misrepresentations, and other inanities. At one
point, its authors claim that border crossings in May, 2024, were
“higher than even the highest month seen under President Trump,” which
is untrue. They also cite the chief of Border Patrol, who had “stated
that Vice President Kamala Harris has not spoken with him since he was
appointed in July 2023”; this simply proves the point that she was not,
in fact, in charge of the border. On Thursday, in a party-line vote
scheduled before the House adjourns for its August recess, Republicans
passed the measure. It is purely symbolic.
The
immigration issue has long been a source of political vulnerability for
the Biden Administration. Polls show that Americans are concerned about
chaos at the border, and that they rank it as one of the most pressing
threats facing the country. Until recently, owing to the explosiveness
of the subject, the White House has preferred to avoid talking about it.
On Wednesday night, in a televised address from the Oval Office, Biden
noted, accurately, that unauthorized border crossings are now lower than
they’d been when Donald Trump left office. (According to data obtained by CBS News,
Border Patrol is on pace to arrest fewer than sixty thousand migrants
in July, which would be the lowest number of monthly apprehensions since
September, 2020.) Yet Republicans, who’ve capitalized on the general
perception of mismanagement under Biden, claimed he was lying. “Biden
really just said border crossings are lower now than under President
Trump,” Representative August Pfluger, of Texas, said on X. “First we’re supposed to believe Kamala was never the border czar and now this??”
To
answer Plfuger’s question, in a word: yes. The number of crossings has
dropped significantly in the past five months, owing mostly to increased
efforts by the Mexican government to arrest migrants before they reach
the U.S. As for Harris, in early 2021, she was tasked with addressing
the “root causes” of migration from the so-called Northern Triangle of
Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. At no point in her
tenure as Vice-President has she been in charge of managing the border.
On
the eve of the House vote, I spoke with the person whose job came the
closest to the one that Stefanik and others have misattributed to
Harris: Roberta Jacobson, a former Ambassador to Mexico who, for the
first three months of Biden’s term, served as the coördinator for the
southwest border at the National Security Council. “My purpose was to
reëstablish the interagency mechanism for making decisions about the
southwest border and immigration,” she told me. Part of what makes the
border so difficult to control is that the task combines domestic and
foreign policy, which involve different branches of the federal
bureaucracy. Jacobson’s remit was to serve as a point person for the
President, convening regular meetings with officials at the Departments
of Homeland Security, State, Health and Human Services, and Defense,
then reporting them up the chain at the White House. “The process for
making decisions didn’t exist when we came in,” she said. “It was calls
with Stephen Miller in which he yelled at the career officials, and they
went off to do what he said, or to try.”
Within two months of Biden taking office, thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America started crossing the border.
The government didn’t have enough space to hold all of them as it
arranged for sponsors to provide housing inside the country. By late
March, there were eighteen thousand children in U.S. custody, and more
than five thousand of them were being kept in borderland holding cells.
It was the first political crisis of Biden’s Presidency. The atmosphere
inside the Administration was tense. “There was a real, active debate
between people from the advocacy community and the operational teams
watching the trend lines,” Ricardo Zúñiga, a former State Department
official who served as Biden’s envoy to Central America, told me. “This
was right in the middle of unwinding Trump-era policy. . . . Every
snippet of messaging coming out of the United States was being misused
by migrant smugglers.”
Biden,
as Vice-President, had travelled to Central America during Barack
Obama’s second term as part of a broader initiative to address border
arrivals at their origin point. “He was not just proud of it—he thought
it made a real difference. And it did,” Zúñiga said. As President, Biden
assigned a similar role to Harris. “He saw it as a good thing,” Andrea
Flores, a border expert at the N.S.C. under Biden, told me. “That made
sense in 2014 and 2015. It didn’t make sense in 2021. All eyes were on
the border. It was a day-to-day, on-the-ground operational emergency.
She was set up to fail, because by now the issue was about so much more
than root causes.”
If
anyone saw the looming political peril at the time, it was Harris
herself. Dealing with “root causes” was, by definition, slow and
strategic work—essential from a policy perspective but politically
inopportune. Positive results could take many years to materialize.
“Harris was resigned to the assignment,” Jonathan Martin and Alexander
Burns write in “This Will Not Pass,”
their book about the early days of the Biden Presidency. “She would
take on the Northern Triangle, traveling to Central America and
negotiating with governments there, but under no circumstances did she
want to be branded Biden’s border ‘czar.’ ’’ At a meeting with the
President and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, that April,
Harris corrected Biden when he said she’d do a “hell of a job” on
immigration. Her brief, she added, was the Northern Triangle, not
immigration.
Harris’s most immediate dilemma, when she took on the
role, was that there were few leaders in the region whom she could talk
to. The President of Honduras at the time, Juan Orlando Hernández, was under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration. (He is now serving a forty-five-year sentence in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.) Nayib Bukele,
the authoritarian leader of El Salvador, who’d had a strong
relationship with the Trump Administration, was increasingly at odds
with Biden over corruption in the Salvadoran government and a pattern of
anti-democratic behavior. That left the regime of Alejandro Giammattei,
of Guatemala, a former surgeon whose conservative administration was
notorious for its ties to special interests. In fact, Guatemala’s
attorney general had been targeting prosecutors and judges who were
involved in the state’s own fight against corruption, in many instances
arresting and jailing them. Nearly two dozen of the country’s top legal
minds were eventually forced into exile.
In
May, 2021, a month before Harris was due to travel to Guatemala, she
convened a meeting in Washington with a group of exiled jurists, all
women, who’d been involved in combating corruption in Guatemala. “At
this table are attorneys who have prosecuted drug traffickers and
organized crime,” Harris said. “At this table are judges who have
advocated for an independent judiciary and the rule of law.” She added
that “injustice is a root cause of migration” and that “corruption is
preventing people from getting basic services.” One of the lawyers in
attendance was Thelma Aldana, a former attorney general of Guatemala who
was forced out of the country as she prepared to launch a Presidential
campaign of her own. “I left the meeting with Harris feeling very
optimistic,” Aldana told me. “She was a prosecutor, too, and we
understood each other well.”
Harris’s
conversations with Giammattei were chillier. He regarded the
anti-corruption investigations as the tool of an overzealous left and
paid lip service to the idea of coöperating with the United States on
migration. Biden, he said, needed “to send more of a clear message to
prevent more people from leaving.” This was precisely the message that
the White House wanted Harris to deliver when she travelled to Guatemala
the following month. On June 7th, in a press conference in Guatemala
City, Harris stood next to Giammattei and addressed migrants directly.
“Do not come,” she said. “The United States will continue to enforce our
laws and secure our borders.” The statement, a single line in a
ten-minute speech, prompted criticism from both ends of the political
spectrum. Conservatives derided her as feckless, progressives as
heartless.
According to Jacobson and Zúñiga,
however, the lines Harris was supposed to deliver got truncated in the
press’s coverage. The part about how migrants shouldn’t come north “was
the line we suggested she deliver,” Zúñiga said. “The whole message was,
Don’t come. You’ll get turned around. We’re working to make things
better so that you don’t have to make the dangerous trip to the border.”
But, he added, “you couldn’t have subtlety in an environment where any
messaging was being misconstrued.” The White House’s approach to dealing
with migration at the border was still undefined, with different
factions inside the Administration competing for influence; as a result,
there was no clear script for Harris to follow. “There were things she
couldn’t say,” Jacobson said. “She was sent down there without the full
set of tools.”
What followed was a string of
unforced errors. Harris faltered in an interview on NBC with Lester
Holt, when asked a predictable series of questions about why she hadn’t
visited the U.S. border. “I haven’t been to Europe,” she replied,
awkwardly. Yet taking a trip to the border brought further liabilities,
underscoring both her and the Administration’s political bind. “There
were four or five border CODELs a week,” a former
White House official told me, referring to trips taken by congressional
delegations. “Republicans were intentionally staging their campaigns
against the ‘Biden Border Crisis.’ Senators were going down there every
other day. They played it off as long as they could. The President
wasn’t going to go down there.” The White House was reluctant to send
Biden because the politics had become toxic. Instead, after returning
from Guatemala and Mexico, Harris flew to El Paso, but this introduced
another messaging issue. As Flores, who worked at the White House at the
time, put it,“It was confusing. Why would she be sent to the border if
she wasn’t meant to be responsible for border policy?”
Another
irony was that, shortly after Biden gave Harris the Central America
portfolio, migration to the U.S. border changed in profound ways. The
number of migrants arriving from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua
increased, eventually eclipsing the number of arrivals from the Northern
Triangle of Central America. The population coming to the border is now
more global than it has ever been, the result of international
conflicts, continued fallout from COVID, political repression, and increasing immigration crackdowns in Europe.
Stefanik’s
resolution condemning Harris deliberately misconstrues the facts of
this global shift. In one of the charges, for instance, Harris is blamed
for “a record-breaking 31,077 Chinese nationals encountered at the
southwest border.” This reference probably says more about China than it
does about the U.S. (An earlier version of the resolution described the
Chinese nationals as “communist,” presumably because they had fled a
communist country.) The resolution also cites “documents” that were
“released” by House Republicans showing that the Biden Administration
“flew at least 400,000 illegal immigrants into the country.” There is
nothing revelatory about the number, although it is inaccurate to call
these immigrants “illegal.” They had availed themselves of the
Administration’s signature migration program: an effort to provide legal
avenues for migrants to be “paroled” into the country so that they
don’t have to take their chances illegally crossing at the border. When
the Biden Administration first designed the program for migrants from
Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, in 2023, it resulted in a
ninety-per-cent drop in border arrivals from the four countries.
The
immigration debate in Washington tends to reduce the rest of the world
to an afterthought. By the time Guatemala held national elections last
year, the border story had largely moved on from Central America. But, in August, a reformist, pro-democracy candidate, Bernardo Arévalo, won in a landslide.
Conservative activists both inside and outside the Guatemalan
government spent the next several months trying to block him from taking
office. In late November, Harris’s national-security adviser travelled
to Guatemala, with “a very direct message,” Zúñiga told me. “The
transfer of power could not be impeded.” Since May, 2021, Harris had
been raising money from the private sector to invest in Central America;
the total is now around five billion dollars. “A lot of that money was
at risk if the election went sideways,” Zúñiga said. “Because of her
engagement, the Administration built credibility with civil society and
business leaders. So, when the U.S. got in the game on the election
matter, we were seen as a credible actor.”
It’s
taken the Biden Administration too long to hone its public messaging on
the border, but it does have one: the government will punish those who
cross illegally, while encouraging others to use legal channels to enter
the country. It’s a blunt formulation that raises many questions that
Harris will eventually have to answer—among others, about what the
future of asylum should look like. Yet it also sharpens the contrast
between the position Harris now represents and that of Trump, who is
hostile to immigration in all forms and contemptuous of immigrants. Last
week’s House resolution reinforces the point: to try to bolster their
nominee, congressional Republicans opted for cynicism. ♦
