4 Reasons Kamala Harris Keeps Dodging Her Border Czar Fails

Kamala Harris has led the U.S. response to the border crisis for the past three years, but she refuses to talk about it. And honestly, who can blame her? Under her watch as America’s chief envoy to combat the root causes of migration, border crossings reached record highs, China expanded its footprint in Central America, fentanyl flooded America, and leftist NGOs wrote U.S. Central America policy. The only winners from Kamala Harris’ leadership are human traffickers and cartel smugglers. Here are four reasons Kamala Harris continues to dodge questions about her very public failure to address the root causes of migration.

Strengthening Latin American Dictators

Focusing solely on stopping migration from the three northern Central American countries is like throwing a bucket of water on a house fire. While migration from Honduras and Guatemala remains a problem, Kamala Harris cannot escape her role in paving the way for the historic exodus of Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians through the Biden administration’s weak policies. Anyone charged with addressing the root causes of migration should be looking at the rise of authoritarianism in the region. Yet Harris and the Biden administration as a whole have only emboldened their repressive grip on their people. Latin America’s authoritarian leaders have never been held accountable for deliberately using migrants as a weapon against the United States. Biden dismantled sanctions against Venezuela’s dictatorship and funneled money to prolong it.

Now, Venezuelan encounters at the border have skyrocketed from 284 in January 2021 to nearly 25,000 in December 2021. There was also no meaningful U.S. response to the Cuban regime’s July 2021 crackdown on innocent protesters. Instead, Biden’s State Department welcomed senior officials from the Cuban Communist Party and TSA paraded them around Florida International Airport. Until the Biden-Harris administration, there was no precedent in U.S. history for officials from a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism to gain access to critical U.S. infrastructure. Nicaragua’s dictator, Daniel Ortega, has turned Managua’s airport into an international stopover for U.S.-bound migrants worldwide.

Instead of cracking down on these dictators, Biden and Harris helped them. They allowed them to push their citizens into the United States by illegally releasing citizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Criminals, of course, took advantage of this. An internal DHS report found that 24 of the top 1,000 Social Security numbers used by sponsors belonged to deceased individuals, and more than 19,000 applicants reused the same 100 physical addresses. And now, nearly 95 percent of remittances to Venezuela are sent through illicit financial channels, according to an investigation by the InterAmerican Dialogue.

A failed campaign against corruption

The core of the White House’s strategy to stop migration was to end corruption in Central America. A delusion was the lack of self-awareness, given the current occupants of the White House. Instead of focusing on implementing proven deterrent measures like internal enforcement or cooperating on border security with regional counterparts, the White House worked hand in glove with the left–leaning NGOs, many of which are funded by USAID and the State Department, to receive recommendations on their preferred targets for sanctions. Congress was never briefed on the evidence used or the logic of how revoking the visas of government officials who are no longer in power reduces migration.

This means that the only Central Americans Kamala Harris has stopped from entering the U.S. illegally are politicians and private sector officials accused by party operatives of past corruption on issues such as climate change violations. At the same time, Kamala claims to have mobilized investment from U.S. private sector companies, but according to USAID, U.S. aid created just over 26,000 jobs in Guatemala in FY23. That same year, Biden and Harris spent more than $212 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars in Guatemala and processed more than 220,000 at the southern border. Around the same time, the U.S. federal government spent $66 billion on illegal immigrants, not including the costs borne at the state and local level.

Ignoring China’s growing influence

Latin America is home to most of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, particularly the subregions of Central America and the Caribbean. It is their unfortunate fortune that Biden has appointed Harris to lead US efforts in both areas. US policy toward the Caribbean has become an extension of the left’s myopic obsession with combating climate change at the expense of curbing China’s growing malign influence and drug trafficking. Under Vice President Harris’ watch, Central America lost two of Taiwan’s longtime allies to Chinese overtures. In Nicaragua, America chose to be outgunned and outclassed by the CCP because of the Biden administration’s decision to allow the consolidation of Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship. While China is investing in key infrastructure projects in the region, the Biden-Harris administration transformed the Development Finance Corporation into a progressive social impact bank.

Kamala Harris’ personal involvement with Honduras’ leftist leader, however, is the epitome of her foreign policy incompetence. In January 2022, Xiomara Castro, the wife of former Honduran president and alleged drug trafficker Mel Zelaya, became president of Honduras. Despite longstanding, credible allegations of criminal activity against Castro and Zelaya, Kamala Harris attended her inauguration and became personally invested in her success as Honduras’ first female president. And while Castro staffed her government with her equally corrupt family members, Kamala Harris showered Honduras with U.S. foreign aid and promises of U.S. investment.

Within a year, Castro would embarrass the United States, end Honduras’ nearly seventy-five-year relationship with Taiwan, and forge ties with China. Her administration would continue to systematically intimidate American businesses, support the Venezuelan dictatorship, and even ostensibly solicit bribes from Honduras’ top drug traffickers. Harris’s utter failure in her regional efforts is an example of the void left by the complete and utter absence of American leadership.

Ideology, not ‘root causes’“

Ultimately, it doesn’t take a foreign policy expert to conclude that Biden and Kamala were never interested in stopping illegal immigration into the United States. From day one, Biden and Harris unilaterally dismantled President Trump’s proven deterrent measures, including cooperative agreements with regional counterparts. They went even further, turning their backs on pro-American leaders in Guatemala and El Salvador who were trying to coordinate efforts to combat the increasing flows of illegal immigrants making their way to the southern border, all because those leaders failed to embrace social policies aligned with the progressive establishment. Most notably, Biden-Harris withheld crucial aid from El Salvador as President Bukele cracked down on the violent gangs that once controlled the tiny Central American nation. This failure was long in the making and was reportedly announced publicly when the White House released its strategy for the root causes of migration, which reads like the ramblings of a left-wing academic.

Kamala Harris needs to stop avoiding the American people and admit her mistakes. The media should also investigate her record, as they routinely do with Donald Trump. If they did, the facts would clearly show that Kamala Harris, despite her objections, has failed America as border czar.

About the author

Ana Rosa Quintana-Lovett is the Senior Policy Director at the Vandenberg Coalition. Most recently, she was the principal Latin America advisor to the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Staff Director for the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. Before that, she led the Western Hemisphere portfolio at The Heritage Foundation.

Image: Maxim Elramsisy / Shutterstock.com.