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. ♦
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