Shortly after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office, the president declared his veep “border czar.”
Biden certainly didn’t want that mess on his plate, and as everyone knows, messes flow downhill. Suddenly, Harris had to try to take care of a mess her boss had abandoned.
So what did she do? Nothing. Literally and absolutely nothing. She has made only one brief visit to the border, she rarely talks about the border, and she has never released a comprehensive plan about what she’ll do about the border.
While the situation occasionally reaches enough mass to earn reports by the mainstream media, it routinely disappears in a day or two. But make no mistake, the southern border is a disaster and it’s an all-out crisis.
How bad is it? The number of foreigners arrested for illegally crossing into America is on pace to top two million this month for the first time ever. So far this fiscal year, the Border Patrol reports more than 1.94 million “encounters” at the border — up from just over 458,000 in 2020, when former President Donald Trump was in charge.
Democrats have long been lax on the issue — they see poor migrants who need endless government help as new Democratic voters — but Biden and Harris have taken that laissez-faire attitude to new heights.
In a surprising show of actual journalism, “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd brought up the subject when he had the vice president on his show over the weekend.
“We’re going to have two million people cross this border for the first time ever. You’re confident this border’s secure?” Todd asked Harris.
The vice president, known for her tin ear, told Todd — with a straight face, mind you — that it’s all good.
“We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration,” Harris said. “But there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix given the deterioration that happened over the last four years.”
Huh. Trump ran on — and then acted on — securing the border. He made great progress until Democrats in Congress began to shoot down additional funding. Again, 458,000 illegal alien “encounters” in FY ’20, nearly two million in FY ’22.
Right on cue, Harris segued to making illegals American citizens.
“I think that there is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do, the first request we made: pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship,” Harris said. “The border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular, over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed.”
“We also have to put into place a law and a plan for a pathway for citizenship for the millions of people who are here and are prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship,” she said.
Then she blamed everyone but herself — the, uh, border czar. “We don’t have that in place because people are playing politics in a state like this and in Congress. By the way, you want to talk about bipartisanship on an issue that at one time was a bipartisan issue both in terms of Republican senators and even presidents.”
Not so, obviously. Democrats shot down nearly everything Trump wanted to do to secure the border, mocking him to boot. And Harris right now only cares about taking over for her elderly boss — she so wants to be in Air Force 1 every day — so she has no intention of having the border mess stick to her, either.
Harris is known for being wildly out of touch with reality. When she took a trip to Mexico and Guatemala before making a very brief stop in El Paso, she did a disastrous interview in which she laughed about not visiting, saying “And I haven’t been to Europe.”
Then in November 2021, while on a trip to France that went mostly unnoticed by the press, Harris spoke to reporters outside of a shop in Paris after buying pots and skillets. She said she was “very concerned” about rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Then she laughed — a lot.
For Harris, the border barely exists. Which makes her the Czar Of Nothing.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.