What did Kamala actually do to address the ‘root causes’ of migration?

Nearly two decades ago, District Attorney Kamala Harris of San Francisco launched a criminal justice reform program called “Back on Track” that attempted to keep low-level drug dealers out of prison. San Francisco resident Amanda Kiefer learned the hard way that the program was open to illegal aliens: she suffered a fractured skull during a purse theft by a man released from lock-up under Harris’s program. Kiefer describes herself as a liberal turned Trump supporter: “When a policy negatively affects you, you wake up,” she told ABC News in July.

Harris claimed in 2009 that the inclusion of illegal aliens in the “Back on Track” program was a “flaw in the design.” She has not commented on it since.

Harris’s refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of her policy positions has been a theme throughout her career. It’s also shaping up to be a major problem for her 2024 presidential run. Harris seems to think she can completely divorce herself from the Biden administration’s wildly unpopular policies. This includes the disastrous border crisis, which has quickly made immigration a top issue for voters. Harris, with the help of the media, is trying to rewrite history when it comes to her role in the mismanagement of illegal immigration.

In March 2021, President Biden said that he was tasking Harris with taking on “root causes” of the massive rise in illegal immigration since the beginning of that year. “I’ve asked her, the VP, today… to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that [need] help… stemming the migration to our southern border,” Biden said in his announcement of Harris’s new assignment.

Media outlets appropriately dubbed her the “border czar” but have since abandoned the moniker in service of her new presidential campaign. “In the past few days, the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had,” Axios reporter Stef W. Kight, who herself reported in 2021 that Harris was “in charge of addressing the migrant surge,” claimed this summer. After backlash, Kight’s article was edited: “This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.”

“The liberal media have provided one of the clearest examples possible of gaslighting and revisionist history,” Curtis Houck, managing editor for NewsBusters, a media watchdog, told The Spectator. “Their attempts to obfuscate the vice president’s record on one of the campaign’s top issues reeks of election interference and they don’t care that you can spot it.”

Joshua Treviño, chief of intelligence and research at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, similarly torched the new narrative surrounding Harris’s role at the border. “Whether she wants it or not, Kamala Harris is one of the bearers of primary responsibility for the Biden-Harris border crisis,” he says. “She was entrusted with the job of bringing it to an end — which was widely understood in Washington, DC, until the hasty retconning of about fifteen minutes ago — and the results speak for themselves.”

Allies of the vice president claim that her role was merely a diplomatic one to improve conditions in the “Northern Triangle” countries: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But immigration experts agree that even if Harris’s role was narrower than the “border czar” title might suggest, she still did not fulfill her duties.

A leaked document of talking points distributed to Democrats claims that “border crossings by migrants from… countries in Vice President Harris’s ‘root causes’ portfolio… have decreased dramatically in recent years. In 2023, they made up 22 percent of all border crossings, down from 41 percent in 2021.” But those numbers are deeply misleading. Overall encounters nearly doubled between 2021 and 2023 and “gotaways” increased nearly sixfold. Taking that into account, Harris’s years-long efforts only precipitated a 5 percent drop in illegal crossings from the Northern Triangle countries, all while illegal crossings of citizens from other countries — Haiti, Venezuela and China — skyrocketed.

Overall, there was a 140 percent increase in illegal crossings from the Northern Triangle under the Biden administration compared to the Trump administration, regardless of the negligible drop by 2023.

“It was clear from the outset she did not make a serious effort, evidenced by the lack of communication with the Northern Triangle,” Blaze national correspondent Julio Rosas, who has covered the southern border for years, told The Spectator. “Even if she was successful, which she was not, it would not matter because the Biden-Harris administration’s policies have enabled people from all over the world to illegally enter the US, not just from the Northern Triangle.”

During her first Latin American trip in 2021, Harris was rebuffed by her amigos down south. Guatemala’s president blamed the US administration’s lack of enforcement for increased migration from his country and bristled at Harris’s attempts to amend Guatemala’s court system. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador blasted the US just hours before his meeting with Harris, alleging that America was backing a “coup” and “explicit… political militancy” against his government. Harris did not meet with the presidents of Honduras or El Salvador, whom the administration publicly accused of corruption, on the trip.

“Kamala Harris didn’t propose or do anything to improve economic and security conditions in the countries of the Northern Triangle. If anything, she was an obstacle for governments trying to improve things,” according to Alfonso Aguilar, director of Hispanic engagement for the American Principles Project. “When President Bukele of El Salvador took tough measures to address rampant crime and violence in his country, the Biden-Harris administration chastised him, alleging his methods led to human rights violations. Similarly, in Guatemala, instead of supporting economic development efforts, the Biden-Harris administration consistently denounced and attacked the country’s business sector, unfairly painting most businesspeople with a broad brush as corrupt.”

A fact sheet from the White House says Harris secured $5 billion in private investment to the Northern Triangle countries, a drop in the bucket of their overall GDP, but there’s no evidence expanded WiFi networks or new coffee farms had any effect on net migration. Unlike an agreement Trump made with Mexico in which he threatened to ratchet up tariffs if AMLO did not assist with reducing border crossings, Harris seemingly got nothing in return for her fundraising efforts.

“The US government cannot condition our border security [on] an improvement in the economies and political stability of other countries. There are too many factors in those countries we don’t control,” Aguilar asserts. “We are now receiving migrants from over 100 countries from every region of the world. Are we going to deal with the root causes of those countries as well before we guarantee operational control of the border?”

Others agree that a serious effort to reduce illegal immigration at the southern border would address the pull factors which attract it — like a lack of border security or incentives in US policy — that our politicians can actually control. “Push factors are important, but the pull factors are the main driver of mass illegal immigration into the US now,” Selene Rodriguez, director for the Secure and Sovereign Texas campaign at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, explains.

Treviño says, “You can constrain supply as much as you wish, but if demand remains, the supply will continue. Both must be addressed. Or to shift metaphors to the realm of the personal: you get what you tolerate. An open border is a root cause.”

Yet Harris punted on visiting the southern border during her trip to Guatemala and Mexico, giving the impression she viewed it as an afterthought rather than a useful experience that might inform her policymaking.

“And I haven’t been to Europe,” she impatiently told ABC’s Lester Holt in June 2021 when he reminded her she hadn’t been to the border yet. “And I mean, I don’t… understand the point that you’re making.”

She ultimately took just one trip to the border, to El Paso, where she claimed young migrant girls asked her how she became the first female vice president, accused former president Donald Trump of having a “child separation policy” and called for an end to “finger-pointing” on who is to blame for an increase in illegal immigration. Months later, the Biden administration smeared border patrol agents, falsely accusing them of whipping Haitian migrants, all as it continued to implement policies that made it easier and more attractive for migrants to cross over the border illegally.

“President Biden got rid of every border security measure in place and did nothing to attempt to strengthen border security measures. Instead, this administration has incentivized mass illegal immigration, thus ensuring it does happen,” notes Rodriguez. “Not only does DHS allow for inadmissible aliens to stay in the US once they illegally enter, but this administration continues to add to its ‘lawful pathways,’” like the Border Patrol’s CBP One app and the humanitarian parole program, which allows tens of thousands of people to enter the US every month.

In addition to minimizing what she was meant to be doing at the southern border, some 2024 revisionists have floated the idea that Harris was saddled with an impossible task and is being made a scapegoat for one of the Biden administration’s most unpopular policy positions. Yet Harris’s political history suggests a real appetite for open borders. She supported San Francisco’s sanctuary city status; raised her hand in support of decriminalizing illegal immigration and providing free healthcare and public education for illegal aliens during her 2020 primary campaign; compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the KKK and suggested the agency ought to be reformed “from scratch”; balked at the idea illegal aliens should be deported or that terrorists might be entering the country illegally and bragged about undoing Trump’s border policies. In September 2022, when southwest border encounters were up 245 percent from the previous year, she even had the gall to claim that the border was secure.

“The Biden-Harris regime refused to secure the border because the extreme leftists who dominate its coalition refused to countenance it — and the leader of that faction is Kamala Harris,” Treviño argues. “Let’s not forget that the disastrous state of the border, and the tens of millions of illegal aliens in the United States now, does not reflect circumstances forced upon Kamala Harris despite her best efforts. They reflect her positive preference, for policy and for the future of the country, and that is not going to change.”

Joe Concha, a Fox News contributor and media critic, says that despite the best efforts of Harris’s allies in politics and the media, voters will eventually be exposed to her record — and they won’t like what they see.

“There is no defending her record,” he says. “Once America learns about this record and these comments, it’s hard to see how she beats Donald Trump.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.