Kamala Harris and the border: The myth and the facts

If Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, Republicans have a ready-made case against her: They can say she was President Joe Biden’s “border czar,” in charge of immigration and the border, and she failed.

At least seven different speakers at the Republican National Convention over the last week have used that moniker to describe Harris, from the president of Goya Foods to anti-immigration activists to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. 

There’s just one problem. The vice president was never in charge of the border. That job belongs to Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, and to Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services.

Still, a combination of right-wing spin, media fascination during Harris’s early tenure, miscommunication from the White House, and growing migrant surges during the Biden presidency have all made that label stick. Now, it stands as one of the more serious challenges Harris faces, whether she’s the vice presidential or presidential nominee.

Where the “border czar” label began

Referring to Harris as the “border czar” isn’t new. Right-wing media, anti-immigrant activists, and Republican politicians have been using the label for the vice president for years. 

It has its roots in March 2021, when Biden announced that he would be giving Harris essentially the same assignment he got during his own vice presidency: coordinating diplomatic relationships to address the “root causes” of migration into the United States.

“I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” Biden said during a White House meeting on migration on March 24, 2021. 

The idea behind this approach is a long-term strategy: Border surges were just one symptom of deeper economic, diplomatic, and security problems these countries face that cause people to make the trek north. The assignment was a bit cursed from the start — a “politically treacherous job with little short-term payoff,” as it was described by the Los Angeles Times — because any benefits from addressing these root causes would obviously take time to appear. Meanwhile, the border saw more legal as well as illegal crossings every month.

Senior White House officials who briefed reporters before the announcement emphasized at the time that this was a diplomatic assignment: a two-pronged approach to build diplomatic ties with these countries and to oversee investment and implementation of foreign aid to these countries to address infrastructure, grow business, and strengthen civil society.

From the start, though, media coverage and the White House’s communication about the role were muddled. Headlines described Harris as the “point person on immigration” and “placed in charge of migration crisis,” while senior officials later said Harris would “oversee a whole-of-government approach” to dealing with migration. 

The White House’s communications team spent much of that early time trying to clarify the assignment, but as migrant border crossings continued to rise, much of the press and the public’s attention became focused on why Harris and the administration were not more focused on addressing short-term problems.

Adding to the mess were Harris’s own missteps. She was widely criticized in the press for being defensive during her first international trips to Mexico and Guatemala in June 2021, and by immigrant rights activists for a speech in which she urged “folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come.” She also evaded questions about why neither she nor Biden had been to the southern border when she was talking about the border abroad, leading to criticism by Republicans.

Then came a widely derided interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt during that trip, in which she appeared to mock Holt’s question about why she hadn’t visited the southern border if she was working to try to stem the flow of migration north. “At some point, you know, we are going to the border,” Harris told Holt. “We’ve been to the border. So this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”

When Holt pointed out that she hadn’t, she seemed to discount the question, replying that she hadn’t “been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t … understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.”

This was a significant moment in the context of Harris’s criticism: During this first year of the Biden-Harris term, Harris and her office were facing intense media scrutiny over the VP’s role, ability to communicate to the public, and her office’s internal strife. Questions swirled in the press about whether Harris was plugged into Biden’s inner circle, whether she had a discernible portfolio of assignments, and whether her team was equipped to help her perform her duties if they were at odds with the president’s staff or leaving her office entirely. 

On top of all this, Harris got another doomed assignment: to lobby for voting-rights reforms in a tied Senate, where Biden and House Democrats’ legislative proposals could not pass a filibuster.

Border crossings would continue to surge over the next three years, further fueling criticism of Harris. As my colleague Nicole Narea has explained, the nature of these immigration surges began to change, too, making Harris’s “root causes” work even more difficult:

Under the Trump administration, most migrants arriving at the southern border were from Central America’s “Northern Triangle”: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. In the last few years, however, the number of migrants coming from those countries has been eclipsed by those coming from South America — particularly Venezuela, Colombia, and Nicaragua — and the Caribbean, including Haiti and Cuba. They have been driven out by recent compounding political and economic crises and natural disasters in their home countries.

Republicans and conservative commentators had a field day with all of this, picking on immigration as a key line of attack during the 2022 midterms. They introduced legislation tying Harris to the term “border czar,” introducing a “Border Czar Accountability Act” and resolutions calling on Harris to be stripped of the assignment. They spent hours on cable news and in Congress talking about the Guatemala trip and the Holt interview. They ran ads during the midterms about immigration, tying Biden and Harris to the border “crisis.”

Ultimately, they managed to blur the line between the assignment Harris got and the worsening conditions at the southern border.

Why Republicans are zeroing in on this attack now

The Republican National Convention has now offered a preview of how this line of attack will be used against Harris as the general election nears. 

Searches for the term have spiked recently, per Google Trends data, similarly to how they spiked when Harris was first given the root-causes assignment, before the 2022 midterm elections, and during previous moments of news coverage about the border.

Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley previewed on Tuesday night how Republicans plan to harness the confusion: “Kamala had one job. One job. And that was to fix the border,” she said. “Now imagine her in charge of the entire country.”

Other speakers this week have referenced “border czar Kamala Harris” being responsible for “encourag[ing] millions of illegals to invade America … and put[ting] the welfare of illegals over their own citizens,” as the Ohio GOP Senate candidate Bernie Moreno put it.

Even the Trump campaign’s chief has acknowledged this is their best line of attack against the VP.

The White House and the Biden campaign, meanwhile, don’t seem to have a robust answer to these attacks, calling them “lies” and “smears” while pointing to the vice president’s diplomatic work over the last few years.

There’s been less media and White House attention paid to the actual assignment she was given, but the administration has routinely provided updates on the “Root Causes Strategy.” She only visited Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico once during the first year of the assignments, though she did hold virtual and in-person meetings with heads of state from the region. Still, it doesn’t seem as though Central America or Mexico has been an actual focus for the vice president, especially since the midterm elections and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

A White House official pointed me to the visits and roundtables Harris has held on this assignment, citing $5.2 billion of investments Harris has announced in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to expand internet access and combat corruption. A Biden campaign official, meanwhile, pointed to the attempts the White House made in 2021 to clarify Harris’s assignment.

As I’ve written before, Republicans’ attacks on the Biden administration’s immigration efforts aren’t going to go away anytime soon. The American public’s mood on immigration and the border has soured dramatically in the last two years, and the specifics of Harris’s original assignment may not matter to voters who just want less immigration, period. As long as the public continues its anti-immigration tilt, it seems likely the “border czar” nickname will be here to stay.