Axios: Kamala Harris ‘Ran Away’ from Border Responsibilities

The Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, shirked the task of governing the nation’s borders, according to reports from Axios and the New York Times.

Axios reported August 19:

There was also resentment and a belief among some [of President Joe Biden’s top aides] that she ran away from responsibility — particularly on immigration — rather than trying to tackle a complex issue. Biden felt that as vice president, he embraced tough assignments early on, including withdrawal from Iraq and implementing the stimulus package.

“Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas, said he tried to reach out to her team to talk about border security but his requests were never answered,” New York Times reported on August 18. The report continued:

“I don’t want to say I told you so, but it did happen the way I said it would happen,” Mr. Cuellar said of the record levels of illegal border crossings earlier in Mr. Biden’s presidency. “I think anyone that’s dealt with this issue knows that it’s a very difficult issue, and I do think she distanced herself.”

Cuellar is a relative moderate in the anti-borders Democratic Party, partly because the many Latinos in his border district recognize the huge pocketbook and civic costs of migration into their working-class communities.

WATCH — Former Obama ICE Director: Harris “Owns” Part of “Untenable” Border We Had Under Biden Whether or Not She Was ‘Czar’:

The newspaper also noted that Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, tried to find evidence that Harris had cared about the issue while she was Attorney General in California:

He recalled trying to find photographs of her visiting the border when she was California attorney general in hopes of rebutting Republican critics. “We wanted to try to find proof that she’d been there during that, but never could find pictures or anything,” he said.

The reports match prior reports showing that Harris repeatedly dodged the high-stakes issue — despite the huge civic and economic damage caused by migration to ordinary Americans.

For example, in March 2021 — after the Biden-Harris administration eliminated the migration curbs Trump had put into place — Biden charged Harris with “stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”  Harris responded that should we “address the root causes” [of migration].

Since then, there has been little evidence that “root causes” have been successfully addressed, and there has been little “stemming” of the migrant flow into Americans’ jobs, communities, and schools.

WATCH — Rep. Monica De La Cruz on Biden’s Open Border Disaster:

This has shifted vast wealth from young working Americans toward older retirees, Wall Street, and wealthy investors — many who backed Harris’s early career in California.

The Associated Press claimed Harris prioritized a “long-term” approach to the “root causes” of migration, saying that “presented with the rise in border crossings, Kamala Harris chose a long-term approach to the problem.”

Harris “resisted taking ownership of immigration … Harris bristled at the implication that she had a direct role to play in fixing the border,” Politico reported August 10.

Harris’s record of sidestepping the border issue may reduce her public support:

The New York Times article is headlined “A Vice Presidential Learning Curve: How Kamala Harris Picket Her Shots,” but does not mention the March 2021 meeting where Harris declined the far-reaching immigration policy offered by Biden to Harris. Some friendly media titled the job the “border czar” job.

Since March 2021, the nation’s immigration policy has been run by border chief Alejandro Mayorkas.

Mayorkas is strongly backed by the party’s West Coast Wing of pro-migration investors and donors. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group has strongly backed Mayorkas.

Mayorkas is very pro-migration, and he has opened many quasi-legal loopholes for millions of economic migrants to cross into the United States. Mayorkas rejects any criticism of his deadly and wealth-shifting policies. “We cannot have the rights and the needs of individuals who are seeking humanitarian relief in the United States be exploited for political purposes,” he told ABC News on January 1.

In March 2021, Biden backed away from border enforcement likely because of the party’s ideological opposition to borders, Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News:

He didn’t have the political flexibility to turn this off [as the flood rose] … Other people in the administration, I don’t doubt — like Susan Rice —would love to have somehow dealt with this. But what were they gonna do? Fire Mayorkas? Face pushback from their own people? — not just the donors, but also activists, their whole base. They were kind of stuck.

Since 2021, Harris has echoed the pro-migration language touted by Mayorkas as he used his legal skills and political backing to cut “safe and humane” quasi-legal pathways for migrants through the nation’s border and past the nation’s cautious judges.

“The president and I are absolutely committed to ensuring that our immigration system is orderly and humane, and I do believe that we are making progress in that regard,” Harris said while standing beside Mayorkas in June 2021.

Harris now argues that, if elected, she will hire more border guards. But she has not said she will cut back the inflow of wealth-shifting migrants into American society via the quasi-legal border doorways cut open by Mayorkas.