Kamala Harris’ disastrous record on the border

The ‘real solutions to help secure our nation’s borders’ would be to restore all the border security policies that the Trump administration put in place.

By Joseph Klein, Frontpage Magazine

According to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz, “the fact is there’s 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.”

Mr. Munoz’s spin is about as fanciful as saying that the extreme left-wing ticket of Kamala Harris and Minnesota’s progressive Governor Tim Walz is representative of middle-of-the-road, mainstream America.

The real fact is that Vice President Harris shares responsibility with President Biden for the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open border and catch-and-release policies that have created the historic crisis at the southern border.

The Harris-Walz team would make the crisis even worse.

The “real solutions to help secure our nation’s borders” would be to restore all the border security policies that the Trump administration put in place, which the Biden-Harris administration recklessly eliminated, and to commence mass deportation.

But such commonsense solutions would be totally out of the question for a Harris-Walz administration.

Instead, an open border, taxpayer funded freebies, amnesty, and a path to American citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants would top their wish list.

That is why Kamala Harris is most comfortable with an ultra-progressive as her running mate who shares her pro-illegal immigrant sentiments.

Early during his term, President Biden assigned Vice President Harris the task to analyze the so-called “root causes” of the surges of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border and to devise a plan to address these “root causes.”

It was all a charade intended to distract the American people from the reality that the Biden-Harris administration’s own reckless policies were at the root of the historic flood of illegal immigrants pouring into the U.S.

If Vice President Harris were truly serious about her assignment, she would have visited multiple times the areas of the southern border where the crisis was most acute.

These visits would have given her the opportunity to observe conditions in these most critical border areas for herself. She could have spoken with the overwhelmed border agents to get their perspective on what has gone wrong and how to fix it.

She could have met with migrants from different countries as they arrived at the border to discuss what motivated them to migrate to the United States and enter the country illegally.

However, Vice President Harris visited the U.S.-Mexico border area only once – El Paso, Texas in June 2021 – for about four hours, during which she spent precious time speaking with illegal immigration advocates.

This visit was more of a photo op than a serious on the ground examination of the crisis.

Indeed, Ms. Harris stayed away from the epicenter of the crisis at that time, which was eight hundred miles away from El Paso in the Rio Grande Valley.

The border czar never even spoke with Raul Ortiz during the two years that he led the federal Border Patrol organization from June 2021 to June 2023.

Nor, as of last month, has Kamala Harris spoken with Mr. Ortiz’s successor, Jason Owens, who was appointed in July 2023.

Vice President Harris visited two of the Northern Triangle Central American home countries from which illegal immigrants were coming to the United States in droves, especially during the early part of the Biden-Harris administration’s term in office.

She made one trip to Guatemala (with a stop in Mexico) in June 2021 and one trip to Honduras in January 2022.

Since then, unvetted illegal immigrants have poured into the United States from countries all over the world, including from adversaries such as China and terrorist breeding grounds such as Afghanistan.

Many of them have been released to live in the interior of the country with little, if any, monitoring.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense could have identified the real root cause of the border crisis without wasting taxpayers’ money on a fool’s errand.

The incentives that the Biden-Harris administration created with its open border and catch-and-release policies have been the pull factor causing the crisis that started after Biden and Harris took office.

Kamala Harris’s support for allowing all immigrants illegally living in the U.S. to participate in the Medicare for All plan she proposed as a presidential candidate in 2019 would only make matters worse.

So would her support for providing millions of illegal immigrants with a path to citizenship.

Governor Walz has already shown the way by signing legislation in Minnesota allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and providing illegal immigrants in his state with access to state-funded health care and free college tuition.

Kamala Harris displayed her cavalier attitude towards real border security in a most outrageous manner by dismissing concerns about terrorists entering the country illegally and then making false asylum claims to stay in the country.

Back in February 2019, she mocked then-President Donald Trump’s warning that a border wall was needed to keep terrorists from crossing the southern border into the U.S.

“For the Commander in Chief to suggest that we have to build a wall across our southern border because there are terrorists who are trying to invade the country, it couldn’t be farther from the truth,” the future border czar said at that time.

How wrong Ms. Harris turned out to be!

By the end of the Trump administration, the number of migrants on the terror watch list attempting to illegally enter the United States between ports of entry was near zero, according to Customs and Border Protection data.

After the Biden administration reversed the Trump administration’s border security policies and abandoned any further building of the wall, the number of suspected terrorists apprehended between ports of entry after crossing illegally into the country skyrocketed.

An ominous interim staff report released by the House Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement revealed that the Biden-Harris administration has let scores of these suspected terrorists free to roam the country.

The report disclosed that “of the more than 250 illegal aliens on the terrorist watchlist who were encountered by Border Patrol at the southwest border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023,” at least 99 were “released into American communities.”

A digital campaign ad for Kamala Harris tried to cast her as “the one who will fix our broken immigration system,” as opposed to “the one who’s trying to stop her.”

The Harris-Walz team’s “fix” would begin with keeping the border open, decriminalizing illegal immigration, granting amnesty to illegal immigrants already in this country, and providing them with taxpayer-funded freebies.

All of this would lead to rewarding the immigrants who entered the United States illegally with a yellow brick road to U.S. citizenship.

It is necessary to stop such plans in their tracks before they can further endanger the security and wellbeing of the American people, who are already in peril because of the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous policies.

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