Within months of taking office in 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris was assigned a difficult task concerning the U.S. southern border, checking in with Central American governments to address the root causes of immigration problems in the United States.
The Trump campaign has already labeled that effort a failure, while Democrats blame the other side.
The assignment for Harris was to focus on what was happening south of the border — in the countries where migrants are originating. She was never actually named a "border czar," a moniker coined by Republicans,
"I've asked the vice president of the United States yesterday to be the lead person on dealing with focusing on the fundamental reasons why people leave Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador in the first place," Biden said in 2021.
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House Speaker Mike Johnson used the term "czar" when calling her completely inept on Sunday. Other Republicans have followed suit.
Harris traveled to Mexico and Guatemala in June 2021, and in her remarks, focused on economic instability, violence and corruption, telling migrants the border is not open.
"The goal of our work is to help Guatemalans find hope at home," Harris said at the time. "At the same time, I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come."
Meanwhile, Harris faced sharp criticism for not going to the border itself and bristled when pressed in an NBC News interview why she had not been to the border.
Just weeks after the NBC interview, Harris visited the southern border, again telling migrants to not come.
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In El Paso, she toured Border Patrol facilities and met with groups that help migrants. Again, her focus was on what causes people to come to the U.S. in the first place. She largely left enforcement of border security to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Over the next two years, the vice president secured more than $5 billion to address the root causes of migration out of Central America. Nearly $1 billion was targeted to the Central America Forward initiative, developing jobs and women's empowerment programs.
The Biden administration has deported or expelled nearly 4.5 million people, the most for any single president since George W. Bush, according to federal data.
Harris has agreed with criticism that the U.S. immigration system is "broken," saying in March the U.S. needs to fix it. But she points the blame at Senate Republicans pushed by former President Donald Trump to extinguish a bipartisan border security deal. Harris claimed Trump would prefer to run on a problem than to fix it.
This story was originally reported by Jim Avila at Scripps News San Diego.
