Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that the Biden administration has “made progress” in trying to gain control of the southern border, even as it tries to pave a more lenient path for migrants rushing to the U.S. in hopes of gaining a foothold.
Making her first border trip as vice president, she toured a Border Patrol office in El Paso, Texas, and then made a snap trip to the Paso del Norte border crossing, where she saw migrants who hoped to make asylum claims.
She delivered an upbeat assessment of the Biden team’s approach to what has been a record border surge, with illegal immigrant children coming in at unprecedented levels and other illegal immigrants tallying rates not seen in more than two decades.
Ms. Harris said the new administration has worked to try to erase Trump policies that she said had left the immigration system broken.
“In five months we’ve made progress, but there’s still much more work to be done, but we’ve made progress,” she told immigrant-rights advocates in a roundtable.
She also gave an attaboy to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was shepherding her on the trip.
“Mr. Secretary, you’re doing a great job,” she said.
Ms. Harris said she views the border surge as the result of what’s happening in Latin America, and said she approaches the issue from the standpoint of trying to solve the “root causes” in the countries that many of the migrants are leaving.
“Most people do not want to leave home. They do not want to leave the place they were raised, the language they know, the culture they know, the church where they go,” she said.
She said that view was reinforced by what she heard Friday.
“The work we have to do is addressing the cause, the root causes. Otherwise we’re going to continue to see the effect — what’s happening at the border,” she said.
Her evaluation of the reasons for the border surge is by no means a consensus conclusion.
A Department of Homeland Security-funded report released this month concluded that most migrants are coming because they can make far more money in the U.S. than they can in their home countries.
Surveys of people in the key Central American countries also show a big interest in leaving home to come to the U.S.
Border Patrol agents have questioned the Biden administration‘s sense for what’s going on. They say the current surge is a response to more lenient policies from the Biden team, which have given migrants a sense that they have a better chance of being allowed to stay under the new regime.
Ms. Harris during her visit met with girls who arrived as unaccompanied children and said that underscored the need to have a more compassionate approach.
“This issue cannot be reduced to a political [one]. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we’re talking about suffering,” she said.
Ms. Harris had previously laughed off suggestions that she visit the border, but said Friday it was always her plan to come, once she‘d made a visit to Central America and Mexico.
Chad Wolf, who served as acting Homeland Security secretary for President Trump, said Ms. Harris‘ visit was overdue, and she went to the wrong place.
He said she should have visited the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas, which is facing the brunt of the surge.
Meanwhile, El Paso, where Ms. Harris was visiting, has served as an overflow location for the families flooding the border.
Mr. Mayorkas said Friday he’s the one who suggested El Paso to Ms. Harris, saying it was one of the “busiest” regions of the border.
Ms. Harris also pointed out it was where the Trump administration began its get-tough Zero Tolerance border policy, which led to separation of children from parents, and was a key location for the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program to push migrants back across the border to await their court hearings began.
The Biden administration has called the Remain in Mexico policy cruel, though Border Patrol agents say it was the key to solving a previous border surge in 2019.
Mr. Trump, who will make his own trip to the border in Texas next week, contends he turned a secure border over to Mr. Biden only to see his successor squander all the gains.
Trump aides have also claimed credit for forcing Ms. Harris to visit the border, saying she feared embarrassment if the former president beat her to it.
And despite Ms. Harris‘ claims of progress, critics say the border situation is not showing signs of improvement.
May saw the highest number of illegal immigrant apprehensions in two decades, and after a dip from catastrophic to merely troubling numbers, unaccompanied migrant children are once again reaching catastrophic levels.
More than 530 were apprehended on Tuesday, and every day this week has seen at least 400 caught, according to Homeland Security figures.