In 2020, Kamala Harris slammed Donald Trump for the deteriorating situation on the southern border.
Now that she’s in office as Vice-President, she’s trying her best to sweep the crisis under the rug.
But now, one massive mistake has come back to haunt her in a major way.
After spending the better part of a year calling President Trump’s immigration policy a failure, Kamala Harris is finding herself in the center of one of the most disastrous immigration crises in American history.
Shortly after Joe Biden took office in January, the flood gates were opened as Biden’s promises of blanket amnesty resulted in a tsunami of migrants making their way towards the southern border.
The end result was predictable. Not only were immigration authorities overwhelmed in a short amount of time, but illegal border crossings surged to a level scarcely seen before in America’s history.
In response to the deteriorating situation, and the revelation that the administration was still using the “kids in cages” policy which Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had so ruthlessly criticized Donald Trump for implementing, the President was forced to ask Kamala Harris to take charge of the immigration crisis.
There was only one problem: Kamala Harris had zero interest in managing the southern border.
This is a fact which even biased outlets like CNN have been forced to admit, with the network reporting that “Two White House officials familiar with the dynamic said Harris and her aides have emphasized internally that they want to focus on conditions in Central America that push migrants to the US southern border, as President Joe Biden tasked her to do. A record number of unaccompanied children crossed into the US this spring, and the throngs of desperate minors present a heart-rending problem as well as a political one.”
Since Biden announced his intentions to name Harris as the one who would oversee the administration’s response to the border crisis on March 24th, Vice-President Harris has not once visited the southern border.
In fact, evidence exists to suggest that Harris and her staff viewed the appointment as little more than a political curse they wished to get rid of as soon as possible.
“After the announcement, Harris’ aides appeared to “panic,” according to one of the officials, out of concern that her assignment was being mischaracterized and could be politically damaging if she were linked to the border, which at the time was facing a growing number of arrivals.” writes CNN.
The reasons for this are obvious. Harris and her team know that the only way to get the situation in the south under control is to reinstate many of President Trump’s old policies, policies which Harris herself railed against last year, and which are deeply unpopular within the Democratic Party.
This naturally means the Vice-President is caught between a rock and a hard place. Should she actually try and solve the problem, she risks ostracizing herself from her Democratic base. Yet if she continues to allow the situation to get much worse, she runs the risk of having the general public turn against Joe Biden.
The result has been a lack of any interest in even attempting to address the issue, with Harris spending the better part of two months simply pretending there is no southern border, and that the President did not ask her to do anything to solve the crisis unfolding there.
But Kamala Harris can only run away from the southern border crisis for so long until reality – and poll numbers – begin to catch up with her.