Vice President Kamala Harris laughed on Monday when she was asked if she plans to visit the southern border amid the crisis that has unfolded under the Biden-Harris administration.
“Do you plan to visit the border?” a reporter asked Harris.
“Um, not today,” Harris laughed. “But, um, I have before and I’m sure I will again.”
The question comes after multiple news reports broke earlier on Monday that contained leaked photographs from inside detention facilities on the southern border. The photos showed large numbers of migrants, mostly children and teenagers, packed into small spaces.
Apparently, the border crisis is now a laughing matter for the Biden administration.
WATCH: VP Kamala Harris laughs when asked if she has any plans to visit the border. pic.twitter.com/z3AdoFX0Dq
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) March 22, 2021
The news comes amid reports from Fox News, Axios, and NBC News that border officials were authorized over the weekend to start releasing illegal border crossers into the U.S. without giving them a scheduled court date.
The Washington Post highlighted in a lengthy report last week how the crisis has unfolded under the Biden-Harris administration:
The warnings began before Biden even took office. During the transition period, career officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection tried to issue sober alarms to the Biden team about the likelihood of a crisis at the border that could quickly overwhelm the nation’s capacity. Senior CBP officials delivered Zoom briefings to the Biden transition team that included modeling projections showing a steep increase in the arrival of unaccompanied minors if Trump’s policies were suddenly lifted, according to one current and two former Department of Homeland Security officials. …
Biden transition officials understood the risks, as well, identifying a surge of unaccompanied minors and a dearth of shelter space exacerbated by the pandemic as the most pressing problems.
Yet Biden immediately embarked on an aggressive strategy to roll back Trump administration policies. On his first day, Biden suspended border wall construction, affirmed protections for young immigrant “dreamers,” scrapped Trump’s ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, and ordered a 100-day moratorium on deportations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He also sent a broad immigration overhaul proposal to Congress, including an eight-year pathway to citizenship for immigrants without legal status.
More moves followed in rapid-fire succession. The president ordered a major increase in refugee admissions. He launched a task force to reunify families separated by Trump’s “zero tolerance” crackdown while easing restrictions for minors under Title 42. And he ended the “Remain in Mexico” program Trump had used to send asylum seekers back across the border to wait outside U.S. territory for their cases to be decided — allowing hundreds of families crowded into squalid camps to enter the United States, producing emotional scenes that circulated widely in Spanish-language media.
Photojournalists, news programs, and reporters have repeatedly pressed the Biden administration over the administration’s refusal to give the press access to view the inside of the facilities. Even Fox News host Chris Wallace called out DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the administration’s refusal to grant access to the media due to the pandemic as sounding “like an excuse” and “not a legitimate reason.”