Vice President Kamala Harris was tasked with tackling the root causes of migration from Central America as illegal border crossings surged in 2021, and she immediately grasped the enormity of the mission.
The region is filled with corrupt government officials, the causes of migration are deeply rooted in economic inequality and social factors – and there is no control at the border.
“He was given a very difficult, complex and complicated assignment,” said U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and an architect of the 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 a presumptive Democratic nominee after President Joe Biden ended his campaign for reelection this month.
Despite Harris’ efforts, nearly 7 million migrants have been arrested illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden, the highest level ever, according to government data, which has prompted Republican criticism.
The reality of Harris’s record on immigration is far more complicated, according to interviews with three current Biden officials, 13 former officials and others who track the issue.
First, Harris was never meant to be the person to brief the border, said Alan Bersin, who held the position as special representative for border affairs under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. “Vice President Harris was never tasked with that,” he said.
Instead, Biden asked Harris to lead diplomatic efforts to reduce poverty, violence and corruption in Central America’s Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as negotiate with Mexico on the issue.
This was similar to the job Biden did while he was vice president.
But Murphy said it was a much broader mission.
“It’s hard to come up with a strategy in the short term that can impact the very real and complex psychological decision-making process that people from these countries go through when they decide to come to the United States,” Murphy said in a phone interview.
And within months of Harris taking office, the focus on three Central American countries did not match the reality at the border — where illegal immigration was surging from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, several former officials and outside experts said.
“In a way, she was kind of at a loss because everybody was focusing on those three countries in the Northern Triangle,” said Roberta Jacobson, who served as the coordinator for the U.S.-Mexico border in the early months of the Biden administration. “Meanwhile, the migrant population was changing dramatically.”
Harris continues to lead the Middle America effort, though she has focused more this year on abortion rights, a top Democratic issue since a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down a nationwide right to abortion.
The White House said in March that Harris helped secure $4 billion in government aid and $5.2 billion in private investment commitments to create or support an estimated 250,000 jobs in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Nespresso began sourcing coffee from El Salvador and Honduras in 2021. Gap Inc. said it was on track to meet a pledge to invest $150 million by 2025 to source textiles in the region and has increased yarn production in Guatemala and provided skills training to women in Guatemala and Honduras.
Ricardo Barrientos, director of the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies think tank, said U.S. aid and private sector investment is just a fraction of the money sent home each year by immigrants from the three countries working in the United States — $37 billion last year alone.
“It’s very small compared to the magnitude of the challenge,” he said. “Or some would say, ‘Too little, too late.’”
By May, the number of migrants caught illegally crossing the border from the Northern Triangle had fallen to 25,000 from a peak of 90,000 in July 2021 — though experts say the impact of Harris’s efforts is still unclear.
‘Border Czar’
Harris made two trips to Central America: to Guatemala in June 2021 and Honduras in January 2022. This was one less than Biden, who made three trips to Guatemala after being assigned a similar role in 2014.
Meanwhile, Republicans blamed Harris for a surge in illegal crossings and called on her to visit the border. She made her first and only visit to US 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 we also have to deal with the effects,” he told reporters at the airport.
During the six-hour trip, Harris visited a migrant processing center, speaking to a group of girls, her office said at the time. But according to a pool report, she did not take a walking tour of the border wall, which Trump officials routinely do.
Raul Ortiz, the Border Patrol chief from 2021-2023, said he never spoke to Biden or Harris, though he met Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence more than once while in a lower position during that administration.
“I would have loved to have had the opportunity to discuss some of the issues and some of the recommended changes that I believe we should have implemented,” Ortiz said.
The White House said in March that Ortiz was invited to meet with Biden in El Paso last year but did not attend, though Ortiz disputed that, saying he was not invited.
liability or asset
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll in June, immigration is the third-biggest concern of American voters after the economy and terrorism, and voters favored Trump’s immigration approach 44% compared to Biden’s 44%-31%.
In an aggressive ad released on July 25, the Trump campaign painted Harris as a liberal who was soft on crime and favored “open borders.” The ad highlighted years-old comments by Harris that people who cross the border illegally should not be treated as criminals, and that the U.S. should “probably think from the beginning” when it comes to immigration enforcement.
“If Secretary of Border Security Harris remains in power, there will be a never-ending line of illegal alien rapists, bloody murderers, and pedophiles arriving to attack our sons and daughters every week,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina last week.
In a statement to Reuters, the Harris campaign painted Trump as an extremist whose administration separated thousands of migrant families and who helped sink a bipartisan border security bill in the U.S. Senate – a message consistent with Biden’s approach over the past year.
“There is only one candidate in this race who will fight for real solutions to help secure our nation’s border, and that’s Vice President Harris,” campaign spokesman Kevin Muñoz said in a statement.
Some immigration advocates hope that Harris — herself the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants — will better understand the human side of the issue.
Harris played a key role in the Biden administration’s launch of a program in June that offers a path to citizenship to immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who are married to U.S. citizens, two people familiar with the matter said.
Daniel Suver, who was Harris’ policy chief when she was California’s attorney general between 2014 and 2017, pointed to her efforts to mobilize legal representation for immigrant children — even though immigration was not explicitly part of her portfolio.
Suvar said he took it upon himself to learn about the application process for special visas for victims of abuse. And he teamed up with Brad Smith, who was then Microsoft’s general counsel and co-founder of the advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense, and started calling law firms.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
