The border crisis , on par with inflation , is perhaps the worst domestic failure of the Biden-Harris administration. It is the result of dumb policymaking and chronic inattention.
So it is startling that, having forced out the incumbent president who is their leader, Democrats appear bent on filling the vacuum with their lamentable border czar.
In March 2021, two months after taking office, President Joe Biden could no longer pretend there was no border crisis. He and his party sure tried, just as they tried to pretend for three years that there was nothing wrong with Biden’s health and mental capacities. But spin and media bias can mask reality for only so long.
Needing to do something to suggest remedial action at the border, Biden turned to his woke-box-checking sidekick. “Harris to lead administration’s efforts to stem migration at border,” proclaimed the headlines .
When asked when she planned to visit the border, Harris sometimes laughed at the notion or deflected : “We also need to deal with the root causes.”
Root causes are worth addressing but are often a way of avoiding doing the unpalatable obvious, such as restoring the successful border policies of former President Donald Trump. And coming from liberal Democrats, root causes talk is usually an excuse for lax enforcement. Coming from the Biden-Harris administration, it was jaw-dropping hypocrisy. The root cause of the border crisis was the collection of Biden’s Day 1 executive actions.
On Jan. 20, he ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy and halted deportations. Illegal crossings immediately jumped by a third to more than 100,000 the following month.
The administration then adopted Harris’s preferred policy of decriminalizing illegal entry, which induced yet more illegal crossings. The consequences of this Biden-Harris policy are overwhelmed border towns, overcrowded detention facilities, and migrants dying as they travel north, drawn by the magnet of the Biden-Harris policies.
Harris saw the border problem as mostly an issue of negotiations with Central American governments, but she couldn’t bring herself to endorse Trump’s best bit of diplomacy, the "Remain in Mexico" policy.
In over three years helming federal efforts at the border, Harris could have used this effective tool crafted by her predecessors but refused to do so because "Trump derangement syndrome" made her and the boss she worked for incapable of doing what worked.
She had one job, and she failed. Now Democrats want to promote her.
At risk of sounding cynical, Harris may have had nothing to do with the border, being merely an empty suit put in place to give the impression that the administration was trying to fix a problem it was in truth ignoring. It’s possible the White House assigned her the border portfolio because she had the right resume — coming from a border state, having a law enforcement background, and yet hewing closely to the Left’s open-border race-centered ideology. She certainly had no expertise or interest in the topic.
The last two chiefs of the Border Patrol, Jason Owens and Raul Ortiz, say Harris never once met with them. These two have run the Border Patrol since August 2021, which is more than 80% of the Biden-Harris administration.
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If this reading is right, and Harris was kept away from decision-making on the border, it means the Biden White House didn’t trust her judgment or ability.
Harris either presided over a fantastically stupid border policy or was not trusted to have a say. Either way, it does not inspire confidence in her executive abilities.
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