The reality of Kamala Harris’s record on migration is much more complicated (File)
Washington:
Vice President Kamala Harris, tasked with addressing the root causes of migration from Central America as illegal border crossings surged in 2021, was immediately faced with the enormity of the mission.
The region is rife with corrupt government officials, the drivers of migration are deeply rooted in economic inequality and social factors – and it did not control the border.
“She was given a very tough, difficult, complicated portfolio,” said U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and architect of a bipartisan border security bill introduced earlier this year.
At campaign rallies and in social media posts, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has intensified his attacks on Harris as a failed “border czar,” especially now that she has emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee after President Joe Biden ended his campaign. up for re-election this month. .
Despite Harris’ efforts, about 7 million migrants have been detained while illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden, according to government data, all-time highs that have fueled Republican criticism.
The reality of Harris’s record on migration is much more complicated, according to interviews with three current Biden officials, 13 former officials and others who follow the issue.
First, Harris was never given the title of border czar, said Alan Bersin, who embraced the label as special representative for border affairs under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. “This was not the job assigned to Vice President Harris,” he said.
Biden instead asked Harris to lead diplomatic efforts to reduce poverty, violence and corruption in the Central American Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as engage with Mexico on the issue.
It was similar to the role Biden held when he was vice president.
But that was an overly broad mission, Murphy said.
“It is difficult, in a short period of time, to create a strategy that will impact the very real and complicated psychological decision-making that people in these countries go through when they decide to come to the United States,” Murphy said in a statement. telephone interview.
And just months after Harris took office, the focus on the three Central American countries was out of step with the reality at the border — where illegal immigration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela was rising, several former officials and outside experts said. .
“She started out, in some ways, at a disadvantage because everyone was focused on these three Northern Triangle countries,” said Roberta Jacobson, who served as U.S.-Mexico border coordinator in the early months of the Biden administration. “Meanwhile, the migrant population was changing dramatically.”
Harris has continued to lead the effort in Central America, although she has increasingly focused on abortion rights this year, a key Democratic issue since a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down the nation’s right to abortion.
The White House said in March that Harris helped design $4 billion in government aid and commitments of $5.2 billion in private investment to create or support about 250,000 jobs in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Nespresso began sourcing coffee from El Salvador and Honduras in 2021. Gap Inc said it is on track to fulfill its promise to invest US$150 million by 2025 to source textiles in the region and has increased yarn production in Guatemala and provided specialized training to women in Guatemala and Honduras.
Ricardo Barrientos, director of the think tank Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies, said US aid and private sector investment represented a fraction of the remittances that migrants from the three countries working in the US send home each year – 37 billion dollars last year alone.
“It’s very small compared to the magnitude of the challenge,” he said. “Or some would say ‘too little, too late’.”
In May, the number of Northern Triangle migrants caught crossing illegally fell to 25,000, down from a peak of 90,000 in July 2021 — although experts say the impact of Harris’ efforts is still unclear.
‘Frontier Czar’
Harris made two trips to Central America: Guatemala in June 2021 and Honduras in January 2022. That was one less than Biden, who made three trips to Guatemala after being appointed to a similar role in 2014.
Meanwhile, Republicans began to identify Harris with the rise in illegal crossings and called on her to visit the border. She made her first and only visit to U.S. border operations in El Paso, Texas, in June 2021, where she defended her portfolio.
“The reality is that we have to deal with the causes and the effects,” she told journalists at the airport.
During the six-hour visit, Harris visited a migrant processing center, speaking with a group of girls, her office said at the time. But she did not walk along the border wall, according to the group’s reports, which Trump officials routinely did.
Raul Ortiz, Border Patrol chief from 2021-2023, said he never spoke to Biden or Harris, although he met with Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence more than once despite holding a lower position during that administration .
“I would have liked to have had the opportunity to discuss some of the issues and some of the recommended changes that I thought we should have implemented,” Ortiz said.
The White House said in March that Ortiz was invited to join Biden in El Paso last year and did not attend, although Ortiz disputed this, saying he was not invited.
Passive or active
Immigration is the third biggest concern of U.S. voters, behind the economy and extremism, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in June, and voters preferred Trump’s approach to immigration over 44%-31% of Biden.
In an attack ad released on July 25, the Trump campaign portrayed Harris as a liberal who was soft on crime and in favor of “open borders.” The ad highlighted comments from Harris from years ago saying that people who cross the border illegally should not be considered criminals and that the U.S. should “probably think about starting from scratch” when it comes to immigration enforcement.
“If Border Czar Harris remains in charge, every week there will be an endless stream of illegal alien rapists, bloodthirsty murderers and child predators to prey on our sons and our daughters,” Trump said at a rally in Carolina of the North last week.
Harris’ campaign, in a statement to Reuters, portrayed Trump as an extremist whose administration separated thousands of migrant families and who helped sink the bipartisan border security bill in the US Senate – messages in line with Biden’s approach last year .
“There is only one candidate in this race who will fight for real solutions to help secure our nation’s border, and that is Vice President Harris,” campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement.
Some immigration advocates hope that Harris — herself the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants — better understands the humanitarian side of the issue.
Harris was instrumental in the Biden administration’s implementation of a program in June to offer a path to citizenship to illegal immigrants in the U.S. who are married to U.S. citizens, two people familiar with the matter said.
Daniel Suvor, Harris’ policy chief from 2014 to 2017 when she was California’s attorney general, highlighted her efforts to organize legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children — even though immigration was not explicitly part of her portfolio.
She decided to learn about the process of applying for special visas for victims of abuse, Suvor said. And she teamed up with Brad Smith, then Microsoft’s general counsel and co-founder of the advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense, and started calling law firms.
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
This story originally appeared on Ndtv.com read the full story
