Is Kamala Harris a “failed border czar,” as Trump says?

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Vice President Kamala Harris met with CEOs in 2021 to discuss aid for the Northern Triangle

From its opening sentence, Donald Trump’s first television ad lambasting his rival Kamala Harris took aim at what his campaign considers her greatest weakness: immigration.

She’s America’s border czar, a narrator says, over footage of the vice president dancing, and she’s let us down.

A series of statistics followed, illustrating what the Trump campaign says happened under Ms. Harris, who was given a role in managing the border crisis by President Joe Biden shortly after his inauguration.

The numbers presented in the video range from 10 million illegal border crossings to 250,000 fentanyl-related overdose deaths.

The voice concludes: Kamala Harris: failed, weak, dangerously liberal.

Harris’ campaign responded that the former president was campaigning on his usual lies.

Not surprisingly, the Trump campaign first attacked Harris as the failed border czar, blaming her for the high number of undocumented immigrants at the southern border of the United States.

Americans have consistently said in polls this year that immigration is one of the top issues facing their country, and that will weigh on many of them when they vote for the next U.S. president in November.

Since that first ad, Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have repeatedly called Harris a “failed border czar,” and associated her with relentless images of people wading through the Rio Grande or squeezing through barbed wire to enter the United States.

Her critics say she should have found a way to solve the problem within the past four years.

But the term “border czar” is controversial. Allies and former officials who worked with the vice president say she has not been tasked with policing the border.

“That was never our position,” said Ricardo Zuniga, former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

She knew from the beginning, as did the entire American government, that the problem of migration had to be tackled at its source.

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Family awaits arrest after illegally crossing border

In early 2021, President Biden gave Ms. Harris the unenviable mission of addressing the root causes of immigration in Central America.

At the time, people were fleeing a perfect storm of gang violence, economic ruin and environmental disaster in a region called the Northern Triangle – Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Speaking to migrants passing through Mexico, it became clear that most came from Honduras, where they said a brutal drug dictatorship was in power and wages were as low as five dollars a day.

Although the ultimate goal of Harris’ role was to reduce the number of people arriving at the U.S. border, Mr. Biden never used the words “border czar” in announcing his nomination.

“She is the best person to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle to stem the flow of so many people to our southern border,” Biden said at the time.

Yet many people have come to view the mission as a global one. Several media outlets, including the BBC, have described Ms Harris as a tsar in their reporting.

Some commentators in Central America and Mexico have questioned her qualifications, given that Ms. Harris had no prior experience in Latin American affairs.

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Harris traveled to Honduras in January 2022 to meet with the country’s new president.

Tsar or not, the task was arduous and thankless.

Addressing decades of underinvestment and the region’s deep economic and political conflicts would require vast sums of money, goodwill, and cross-party cooperation. But those resources are in dire short supply in Washington, especially when it comes to immigration.

The idea that a U.S. administration could change 500 years of Central American history in four years is ridiculous, says Ricardo Zniga.

As the former top U.S. diplomat in the Northern Triangle, he argues that the Biden administration has made progress in addressing Central America’s problems.

He points out that Ms Harris helped raise $5 billion ($3.9 billion) from the private sector for job creation and entrepreneurship in the region. Several former members of her team recount how she personally called CEOs to persuade them to invest funds.

During her visit to Guatemala and Mexico in June 2021, I saw Harris trying to put on a kinder face, after four years of harsh rhetoric from Donald Trump. She said she understood that people were fleeing hunger, hurricanes and the pandemic, and then set up a task force on corruption in Central America.

This trip is especially remembered for the very clear message she sent to all would-be emigrants: “Do not come. If you come to our border, you will be turned away.”

Millions of people ignored his warning. About two years later, in December 2023, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents encountered 300,000 undocumented immigrants at the southern border of the United States.

Many who have governed along the border in recent years have a negative view of Kamala Harris and her work in Central America.

“Whatever she does diplomatically in other countries, I wouldn’t say it’s very effective, given what we’ve seen here at the border,” said Douglas Nicholls, the Republican mayor of Yuma, Arizona.

We had record numbers of people, numbers that far exceeded anything we had ever seen before, including more than three times the population of my city in one year. These numbers were frightening.

The vice president is a legitimate target on this issue, which he says is not an excuse invented to drum up support from his base.

This problem should have been addressed much earlier, says Mayor Nicholls.

Others suggest that the funds Ms Harris helped raise had little impact on the main motivation driving people north: getting paid in U.S. dollars.

Ricardo Barrientos, director of the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies, said U.S. private sector investment pales in comparison to the remittances sent home by Central American migrants: $37 billion last year alone.

“It’s very little compared to the magnitude of the challenge. Some will say, ‘too little, too late,’” he said.

But Katie Tobin, who worked on immigration in the White House, says Ms Harris’ work has been deliberately misinterpreted and portrayed in a bad light.

Harris deserves credit for the good news in Central America, she said. She points to statistics showing a 72% drop in immigration from Central America alone between March 2021, when Harris took office, and June 2024.

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Republican Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance Visits Arizona’s Southern Border

Ultimately, opinion on Ms. Harris’s record may simply be divided along party lines.

In recent months, the total number of undocumented migrants has fallen.

This is partly due to an executive order from President Biden allowing migrants in the United States illegally to be expelled without their asylum claims being considered. There are also more legal pathways for potential migrants to enter the United States.

Ms. Harris’ defense has focused primarily on highlighting Trump’s resistance to getting bipartisan agreement on immigration reform in Congress.

In February, lawmakers reached a deal after intense negotiations, in which Democrats gave up significant ground to Republican positions. Republican leaders then blocked it at Trump’s request, apparently because he didn’t want to hand a victory to the Biden administration.

It was Trump himself who, for very openly political reasons, undermined a deal that would have helped stabilize the border, Zniga claims. The Trump campaign is therefore obstructing its own argument on this point.

Yuma Mayor Nicholls is unmoved by the defense, saying, “I think it’s a very short-term memory.”

He recalls reaching out to the Trump White House at a moment of crisis. He was invited to discuss immigration directly with the president and the secretary of Homeland Security in a meeting where he was given additional resources.

Three months later, he says we are out of this crisis.

This is called effective leadership at the border, he adds.

However, Tobin believes Harris’ campaign should talk about it more.

When there is a vacuum and the vice president is not talking about immigration, it creates an opportunity for Republicans to fill the airwaves with misinformation.

Harris’ campaign responded to Trump’s first ad with her own campaign.

The first focused on Trump’s opposition to the immigration deal and accused him of trying to prevent him from fixing the “broken” immigration system.

Another more recent one highlighted her work before the Biden administration, emphasizing that as California attorney general, Harris went after drug cartels and gangs — and that as president, she would crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.

It remains to be seen whether this new position will be enough to shake off his failed border czar label, given that Republicans will likely continue to hammer home that image until Election Day.

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