CNN
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The border crisis erupted just months after President Joe Biden took office, and he sought his vice president’s help in solving the intractable problem of immigration.
It seemed like a no-win political mission, and Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff were quick to make one thing clear: She was not in charge of the southern border.
Three years later, that issue has overshadowed Harris’ unprecedented White House campaign and become the center of attacks from Republicans.
“As a result of her dangerously extreme immigration policies, the largest invasion in history is now happening on our southern border and the situation is getting worse, not better,” former President Donald Trump said Tuesday in an extraordinary conference call with reporters, falsely claiming that Harris had been tapped to be Biden’s “border secretary.”
Control of the U.S.-Mexico border has been a political liability for Biden, but with Trump making it a pillar of his campaign, it is likely to be followed by Harris.
Over the past three years, unprecedented numbers of border crossings have come to characterize the administration’s immigration record and recently led the White House to take aggressive steps to dramatically crack down on asylum attempts at the U.S. southern border.
As the vice president’s campaign takes shape and immigration remains a top concern for voters, her team is being forced to tackle a mission that has seen early success in Central America as a result of major private sector investment but is tied to the administration’s larger immigration agenda.
Harris did not mention border security during her first rally for the 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday. The issue has not featured much at campaign rallies over the past year, but both she and Biden have recently cited a bipartisan immigration deal scrapped by Trump to argue Republicans are not serious about border security.
According to a memo obtained by CNN, the House Republican campaign organization is urging lawmakers to focus on Harris’ failed border policies.
Harris’ root cause investigation dates back to March 2021, when Biden tasked the vice president with overseeing diplomatic efforts in Central America amid an influx of unaccompanied migrant children, an assignment he saw as a sign of respect, having served in the same role under former President Barack Obama.
The Department of Homeland Security would retain responsibility for overseeing border security while Harris focused on long-term solutions.
At the time, most of the minors apprehended at the southern US border were from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, countries that have been hit hard by major hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic and have been major sources of migration over the past decade.
As the vice president’s team began to strategize, the administration’s problems grew. Seven months later, the Biden administration was overwhelmed by migrants arriving from further afield in South America, outside Harris’s jurisdiction.
As border crossings surged, Republicans denounced the vice president and called Harris a “border czar,” a title the White House rejected, saying Harris’ focus was on the region, not border security. And in 2022, as an affront to Harris, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott began bussing migrants to Harris’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.
Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., on Tuesday criticized efforts by House Republicans to portray Harris as in charge of the border as “ridiculous and disingenuous.”
“Let me be clear: there was no ‘border secretary.’ Kamala Harris’ role was to participate in multilateral discussions with Latin American countries,” the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus told reporters.
As the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border became a political weak spot for Biden, Harris spoke only sporadically about her efforts.
And her early comments are likely to be used by Republicans in the coming months.
In a June 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, about five months after taking office, Harris was pressed about the fact that she had yet to visit the U.S.-Mexico border.
“You know, we’re going to be at the border at some point,” the vice president said. “We’ve been to the border. So this whole issue about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”
Holt responded: “You’ve never been to the border.”
“I’ve never been to Europe, so I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Harris said with a laugh, adding, “I’m not downplaying the importance of borders.”
Later that month, Harris visited the border.
White House officials quickly began working to improve Harris’s performance after she was appointed to tackle the root causes of migration.
According to a former senior administration official, officials compiled a series of memos examining what Biden did when he served in a similar role as vice president, analyzing what went well and what could be improved.
In some ways, the area was already familiar to Harris from her time as California’s attorney general.
“There’s a thread running through her work as attorney general in terms of getting to the root causes as vice president and starting to build relationships in Mexico and Central America,” said Daniel Suber, Harris’ policy director at the time and now a partner at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, arguing that her work often focuses on concrete, measurable outcomes.
Officials met daily and kept the vice president updated on the process, which another former administration official said was “tensed” as the border crisis worsened.
“She ended up studying it and putting her own spin on the private sector elements,” one former administration official said, noting that it was an area Biden concluded that as vice president he didn’t have time to fully develop.
Harris put together the Sino-American Partnership, which serves as a liaison between companies and the U.S. government. Her team and the partnership work closely on initiatives that will create jobs in the region. Harris also negotiates directly with foreign leaders in the region.
Earlier this year, Harris met with Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo to strengthen bilateral relations between the United States and Guatemala and to discuss good governance, economic opportunity, security and migration management, according to a White House statement.
Approximately 56 companies from financial services, textiles and apparel, agriculture, technology, communications and the nonprofit sector have joined forces to revitalize the local economy, collectively investing more than $5 billion.
Experts have praised Harris’ ability to secure private investment as her most visible move in the region to date, but cautioned about the long-term sustainability of such investment.
Honduran Investment Minister Miguel Medina argued that White House backing for the effort had helped attract big business and private capital to the region.
“The difference with this partnership is that the work they have done and will continue to do to promote things that are out of reach for the average company in Honduras,” he said, citing as an example the company’s work with Nespresso to buy and sell coffee beans.
“If it hadn’t been moved from the White House, it would never have been as successful as it was,” Medina added.
The direct impact on migration is difficult to measure, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seen a significant drop in the number of migrants arriving at the southern border from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, according to federal data.
“In the long run, she can certainly claim credit for starting the effort to improve the lives of Central Americans,” said Andrew Selley, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
