“Border Czar” Harris Silent as Title 42 Expires

Where’s Kamala Harris? Vice president silent as Title 42 expires
As immigration takes center stage with the expiration of Title 42, a key member of the Biden administration is having a decidedly quiet week.

Vice President Kamala Harris was tasked with leading the White House’s border efforts in March 2021 but has only spoken sporadically about the issue while visiting the border just once. Her critics are out in full force amid an expected surge in illegal immigration.

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“Border Patrol sources say ‘the dam is about to break,’ and Joe Biden and ‘border czar’ Kamala Harris are nowhere to be found,” reads a tweet from the GOP.

Republican officials have hammered that point home over the last few days, invoking the border czar tag as a pejorative.

Harris was given the lead border role more than two years ago by President Joe Biden, who took on a similar task during his own run as vice president.

But Harris’s office rejects the notion that she’s in charge of the administration’s border policy, with a top aide saying within days of the assignment that she “is not doing the border” and would instead deal strictly with the root causes of migration. Harris has visited Guatemala and Honduras as part of her focus on Northern Triangle countries, speaking about migration only sporadically.

Harris’s office did not publicly release a weekly schedule for May 8-11. On Wednesday, she swore in commissioners for an initiative on advancing economic opportunity for Hispanics and met with the House Pro-Choice Caucus leadership. She made no public appearances Thursday, the same day Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spoke in the White House briefing room.

In response to questions from the Washington Examiner, the White House did not address Harris’s schedule but did send statements about her border efforts.

“As the vice president works on these long-term issues and getting at the root of the problem — the complex issues that causes people to migrate in the first place — the administration is simultaneously taking action to address the immediate challenge at the border and expand legal pathways where we can,” a White House official said.

The official pointed to $4.2 billion that has been raised to invest in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, with the idea that better opportunities there will prevent people from leaving.

Joel Goldstein, a Saint Louis University law professor emeritus, said the border assignment is fair though sometimes misunderstood.

“Vice presidents, like presidents, have to handle the most difficult problems, and it’s not unfair to ask a vice president to work on helping the three countries involved (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) eliminate conditions which induce people to leave them for the United States,” Goldstein, a vice presidential expert, said.

But he holds that Harris’s mission does not extend to leading the Biden administration’s border efforts generally.

That hasn’t stopped a flood of criticism as illegal immigration hit new records in 2021 and 2022.

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley has focused on Harris because she would become president should Biden, 80, be unable to complete a second term.

“This uncertainly about Biden’s mental competence means Americans must consider the actual competency of the vice president,” Haley wrote in a May 1 op-ed. “Kamala Harris is one of the most incompetent elected officials in the country. Her failures in foreign policy and managing the border are too numerous to mention — to say nothing of the word salad that defines her unscripted remarks.”

Polls show that voters largely agree.

Harris’s favorability rating is 38.7% against a 54.2% unfavorability score, per the RealClearPolitics average, a worse score than Biden and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and roughly in line with former President Donald Trump.

The vice president has spoken much more frequently about abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, visiting more than a dozen states to discuss the issue ahead of a midterm cycle in which Democrats overperformed.

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The border issue, on the other hand, is one the Biden administration struggles with. Biden’s approval on the issue is just 35.2%, lower than his overall approval rating. But illegal immigration tends to animate Republicans more so than Democrats.

“Republicans and their media allies may try to make it an [election] issue, but I doubt it will be particularly important,” Goldstein said.