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REPUBLICANS CALL HARRIS A FAILED BORDER CZAR. THE FACTS TELL A DIFFERENT STORY.

By Ted Hesson, Mica Rosenberg and Kristina Cooke
July 30, 20249:47 PM GMT+2Updated 6 hours ago
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Item 1 of 5 U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with Gloria Chavez, Chief
Patrol Agent of the El Paso Sector, as she visits El Paso central processing
center in El Paso, Texas, U.S., June 25, 2021. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File
Photo
[1/5]U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with Gloria Chavez, Chief Patrol
Agent of the El Paso Sector, as she visits El Paso central processing center in
El Paso, Texas, U.S., June 25, 2021. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

WASHINGTON, July 30 - Vice President Kamala Harris, tasked to deal with the root
causes of migration from Central America as illegal border crossings were rising
in 2021, immediately ran into the enormity of the mission.
The region is riddled with corrupt government officials, the drivers of
migration are deeply rooted in economic inequality and social factors - and she
didn't control the border.
"She was given a very hard, difficult, convoluted portfolio," said U.S. Senator
Chris Murphy, a Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and an architect of
a bipartisan border security bill introduced earlier this year.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue

At campaign rallies and in social media posts, Republican presidential candidate
Donald Trump has intensified his attacks on Harris as a failed "border czar,"
especially now that she has emerged as the likely Democratic nominee after
President Joe Biden ended his campaign for reelection this month.
Despite Harris' efforts, some 7 million migrants have been arrested illegally
crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden, according to government data,
all-time highs that have fueled Republican criticism.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue

The reality of Harris's record on migration is far more complicated, according
to interviews with three current Biden officials, 13 former officials and others
tracking the issue.
First, Harris was never given the portfolio of border czar, said Alan Bersin,
who embraced the label as a special representative for border affairs under
Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. "This was not the job assigned to VP
Harris," he said.

Instead, Biden asked Harris to lead diplomatic efforts to reduce poverty,
violence and corruption in Central America's Northern Triangle countries of
Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as engage with Mexico on the issue.
It was similar to the job Biden had when he was vice president.
But that was an overly broad mission, Murphy said.
"It's hard in a short period of time to come up with a strategy that impacts the
very real and complicated psychological decision-making that people in those
countries go through when they're deciding to come to the United States," Murphy
said in a phone interview.

And within months of Harris taking the job, the focus on the three Central
American countries was out of step with the reality at the border - where
illegal immigration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela was spiking,
several former officials and outside experts said.
"She started off, in a sense, at a disadvantage because everyone was focusing on
those three countries in the Northern Triangle," said Roberta Jacobson, who
served as a coordinator for the U.S.-Mexico border in the early months of the
Biden administration. "Meanwhile, the migrant population was changing
dramatically."

Harris continued to lead the Central America effort although she has
increasingly focused on abortion rights this year, a top Democratic issue since
a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision struck down the nationwide right to an
abortion.
The White House said in March that Harris helped engineer $4 billion in
government aid and commitments of $5.2 billion in private investment to create
or support an estimated 250,000 jobs in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Nespresso started sourcing coffee from El Salvador and Honduras in 2021. Gap Inc
said it is on pace to meet a pledge to invest $150 million by 2025 to source
textiles in the region and that it had increased yarn production in Guatemala
and provided skills training to women in Guatemala and Honduras.
Ricardo Barrientos, director of the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies
think tank, said the U.S. aid and private sector investment was a fraction of
the remittances migrants from the three countries working in the U.S. send home
each year – $37 billion last year alone.
"It's very small compared to the magnitude of the challenge," he said. "Or some
would say, 'too little, too late.'"
By May, the number of migrants from the Northern Triangle caught crossing
illegally had fallen to 25,000 from a peak of 90,000 in July 2021 - although
experts say the impact of Harris' efforts remain unclear.

Reuters Graphics Reuters Graphics


'BORDER CZAR'

Harris made two trips to Central America: Guatemala in June 2021 and Honduras in
January 2022. That was one fewer than Biden, who made three trips to Guatemala
after he was assigned a similar role in 2014.
Meanwhile, Republicans began identifying Harris with rising illegal crossings
and called on her to visit the border. She made her first and only visit to U.S.
border operations in El Paso, Texas, in June 2021, where she defended her
portfolio.
"The reality of it is that we have to deal with causes, and we have to deal with
the effects," she told reporters at the airport.
During the six-hour visit, Harris toured a migrant processing center, speaking
with a group of girls, her office said at the time. But she did not tour the
border wall on foot, according to pool reports, which Trump officials did
routinely.
Raul Ortiz, the Border Patrol chief from 2021-2023, said he never spoke with
Biden or Harris although he met with Trump and then Vice President Mike Pence
more than once despite holding a lower rank during that administration.
"I would have liked to have had an opportunity to discuss some of the issues and
some of the recommended changes that I thought we should have implemented,"
Ortiz said.
The White House said in March that Ortiz had been invited to join Biden in El
Paso last year and did not attend, although Ortiz contested that, saying he was
not invited.


LIABILITY OR ASSET

Immigration is the third-highest concern of U.S. voters behind the economy and
extremism, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll in June, and voters favored Trump's
approach to immigration over Biden's 44%-31%.
A Trump campaign attack ad aired in six election battleground states on Tuesday
showed images of migrants attempting to illegally cross the border, tying the
issue to crime and pinning the blame on Harris.
Studies show immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born
Americans.
"If border czar Harris stays in charge, every week will bring a never-ending
stream of illegal alien rapists, bloodthirsty killers and child predators to go
after our sons and our daughters," Trump said at a rally in North Carolina last
week.
The Harris campaign in a statement to Reuters portrayed Trump as an extremist
whose administration separated thousands of migrant families and who helped sink
the bipartisan border security bill in the U.S. Senate - messaging in line with
Biden's approach over the past year.
"There's only one candidate in this race who will fight for real solutions to
help secure our nation's border, and that's Vice President Harris," campaign
spokesperson Kevin Munoz said in a statement.
Some immigration advocates hope that Harris - herself the daughter of Indian and
Jamaican immigrants - would better understand the humanitarian side of the
issue.
Harris was instrumental in the Biden administration's rollout of a program in
June to offer a path to citizenship to immigrants in the U.S. illegally who are
married to U.S. citizens, two people familiar with the matter said.
Daniel Suvor, Harris' chief of policy between 2014 and 2017 when she was
California attorney general, pointed to her efforts to marshal legal
representation for unaccompanied immigrant children - even though immigration
was not explicitly part of her portfolio.
She took it on herself to learn about the application process for special visas
for victims of abuse, Suvor said. And she teamed up with Brad Smith, then the
general counsel for Microsoft and co-founder of the advocacy group Kids in Need
of Defense, and started calling law firms.

Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the
world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.

Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington, Mica Rosenberg in New York and Kristina
Cooke; Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington; Diego Ore in
Mexico City and Sofia Menchu in Guatemala City; Editing by Suzanne Goldenberg

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

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Purchase Licensing Rights
Ted Hesson

Thomson Reuters

Ted Hesson is an immigration reporter for Reuters, based in Washington, D.C. His
work focuses on the policy and politics of immigration, asylum and border
security. Prior to joining Reuters in 2019, Ted worked for the news outlet
POLITICO, where he also covered immigration. His articles have appeared in
POLITICO Magazine, The Atlantic and VICE News, among other publications. Ted
holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism and bachelor's degree from Boston College.

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Mica Rosenberg

Thomson Reuters

Mica Rosenberg leads the immigration team at Reuters, reporting her own projects
while helping edit and coordinate cross-border coverage. An investigation she
published with colleagues into child labor in the United States – exposing
migrant children manufacturing car parts and working in chicken processing in
Alabama – was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a George Polk award
among other honors. She was a foreign correspondent reporting from nearly a
dozen countries across Latin America and also covered legal affairs and
white-collar crime in New York. She completed a Knight Bagehot Fellowship in
business journalism and earned a master’s from Columbia’s School of
International and Public Affairs. She is originally from New Mexico and is based
in Brooklyn.

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