On the “Today” show this morning, Lester Holt asked Vice President Kamala Harris one serious journalistic question and achieved greater tactical surprise than the Israelis during the Six Day War.
A five-minute excerpt of the interview caused internet excitement, with Holt asking Harris, who is visiting Central America to petition national leaders to clamp down on the surge in illegal immigration, “Do you have any plans to visit the border?”
“At some point,” she said, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “We are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So, this whole, this whole, this whole thing about the border — We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border,” Harris said emphatically.
“You haven’t been to the border,” Holt said, skewering her attempt to hide behind the actions of others in the administration.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris said, cackling. “And I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making.”
The media have reached such a level of sycophancy that Harris couldn’t foresee the possibility of facing an inconvenient question. Thus, Harris treated the act of asking the person President Biden has personally tasked with tackling the border crisis about whether she’ll observe the problem firsthand as though it were as irrelevant as asking her why she wears Converse sneakers.
“We have to deal with what's happening at the border.”@VP Kamala Harris spoke exclusively with @LesterHoltNBC on her first trip overseas, how the administration is addressing the immigration crisis, and if she plans to visit the southern border herself. pic.twitter.com/sA4We7peeR
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 8, 2021
Holt’s questions were professional and appropriate, but not particularly harsh. While NBC will air more of the interview this evening — so there’s no way to know if he raised the Biden administration’s failed border policies — no one can be adequately informed about the border crisis without that added context.
A full-fledged segment on the immigration crisis would note that, years before Kamala Harris traveled to Central America to address any “root causes,” President Donald Trump hammered out international agreements that addressed the problem at the source — and was viciously attacked for it.
Trump required so-called “asylum seekers” (who were largely economic migrants) to apply for asylum in the closest safe country — often Guatemala or Mexico — rather than coming directly to the United States. Mexican asylum seekers also had to remain in Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP).
NBC News covered these policies in 2019 by saying, “The Trump administration … could force asylum-seekers to seek protection in one of the most dangerous countries in the world instead of the United States.” Vox accused the president of “dismantling the asylum system as we know it.”
The Biden administration promptly parroted that line. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed, “We do not have the capacity now to address the asylum seekers’ claims … because that system was dismantled in its entirety by the prior administration.”
In its desire to repeal the entirety of the Trump administration, Biden officials repealed MPP, suspended Trump’s “safe third country agreements,” and reinstated catch-and-release. Campaign promises to lavish “free” healthcare on all illegal immigrants spurred a predictable wave of illegal border crossings.
The number of illegal immigrants crossing the border has increased by more than 100,000 a month since the beginning of the Obama administration.
A total of 453,090 illegal immigrants have entered the United States since February — not including those who crossed the border the first 11 days of the Obama-Harris administration.
The border crisis has exploded to such a degree that even MSNBC can no longer deny its proportions or provenance.
On Tuesday morning, Gabe Gutierrez reported from an illegal immigrant tent camp in Reynosa, Mexico. “Something we’re hearing over and over again,” he said, is that illegal immigrants are “hearing from smugglers that they will be allowed to stay in the United States. Of course, that’s not really the reality here. But the change is policy is being exploited by these human smugglers,” who ply their trade in concert with international drug cartels.
Would-be immigrants pay human traffickers “up to $11,000, funded by American relatives, to be able to make this journey.”
MSNBC’s guest host Chris Jansing called Gutierrez’s report, and its images, “powerful and devastating.”
Kamala Harris, who reportedly greeted the news that she had to handle the border crisis with sheer “panic,” has no interest in discovering how powerfully such images could devastate her image if she were caught in the same frame.
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The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.