Don’t Fall for the Media’s Humiliating Defense of Kamala Harris on the Border

(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

In March 2021, President Joe Biden announced that he was putting the admittedly difficult issue of border security on Vice President Kamala Harris’s plate.

“I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” said Biden at the time.

At the time, Politico reported that Harris would be “the White House’s point person on immigration issues at the nation’s southern border” and had been tasked with “stemming the rising tide of migrants, many of them unaccompanied children, arriving in the U.S..” The Associated Press asserted that Harris was “to lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem.” Axios stated that Biden had put “Harris in charge of border crisis” and “addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexican border.” In another article, it referred to her as the administration’s “border czar.”

That title has been the subject of much controversy in the days since Harris emerged as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The border crisis that she and Biden presided over is expected to weigh heavily on voters’ minds when they go to the polls this November; one Morning Consult poll found that 58% of swing state voters said immigration would be “very important” in determining who they cast their ballot for. An additional 28% said it would be “somewhat important.”

And in case you’re wondering why they care about it, another survey found that 62% of Americans and 53% of Hispanics would back a “new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally.”

Unsurprisingly then, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — and Republicans more generally — have sought to make political hay out of her work on the border, often using the “border czar” title to deplore her record.

That, according to the press, is the real story.

“Kamala Harris Wasn’t the ‘Border Czar,'” insisted Time Magazine .

“No, Kamala Harris is not a ‘border czar. But that doesn’t matter to Republicans,” explained Vox.

And in what was one of the more humiliating examples of the media’s surrender to the interests of Democratic Party in quite awhile, Axios added an editor’s note to a whiny article complaining that the GOP had used the label to describe Harris to acknowledge that “Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.”

There are layers to this delusional attempt to deceive the public.

First, it’s obvious that Republicans are using “border czar” now — just as the media happily used it three years ago — as a shorthand, not a proper noun. “Border czar” is an informal label denoting that the head of the executive branch tasked Harris with addressing the issue, not that she was confirmed by the Senate as such.

Second, the defense of Harris being offered by much of the Fourth Estate — that she was actually only supposed to worry about the diplomatic solutions to the problem — is perfectly reflective of the folly of her and Biden’s approach to the issue. They believed that they could fix the problem while discarding of effective enforcement mechanisms by addressing “root causes.”

And third, even if her mandate was only to stop people from fleeing their countries to come to the border, she failed miserably. People have continued to flock to the border, bringing with them the maladies — drugs, human trafficking, and death — that have radicalized the American public on this issue. In some ways, to accept the media’s narrative now is to endorse an even more scathing indictment of Harris’s performance. Evidently, she couldn’t even manage this much more limited task.

Six Democratic congressmen apparently agree. On Thursday, they even voted for a resolution “strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States Border.” That’s a staggering rebuke for elected Democrats to offer their newly-minted standard bearer at a politically sensitive moment.

Their stand is a credit to them that makes the media look even worse. If they can be honest about Harris’s abysmal record on the border, why is the press debasing itself with such a picayune defense of it?