Vice President Kamala Harris Harris talks to the media on arrival to El Paso, Texas.Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Even before President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the race on Sunday afternoon, Republicans already had a line of attack prepared against the likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris: “Border czar.”
As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.
Harris was never appointed the “czar” of “the border.” Nor is she in charge of it. That is to a large extent the purview of the secretary of homeland security, which of course Republicans know all too well. They tried and failed to impeach Biden’s head of DHS Alejandro Mayorkas on baseless allegations that he deliberately enabled “open borders.”
That didn’t make much difference last week. As many as seven speakers at the Republican National Convention referred to Harris as “border czar.” Defeated GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley exemplified the critique: “Kamala had one job. One job. And that was to fix the border. Now imagine her in charge of the entire country.”
On Sunday, Donald Trump echoed the sentiment. “She was in charge of the border,” he told CBS News. “She was the border czar, she was the worst ever. The worst ever. We had the worst border ever so that wouldn’t matter.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described Harris as “the border czar during the worst border crisis in American history” and Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), said Harris “co-signed Biden’s open border.” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, whose political stunt of busing thousands of migrants across the country—including some to the doorsteps of the vice president’s residence in Washington, DC—has helped re-shape the national conversation around immigration, also called Harris “Borders Czar,” saying “I think I will need to triple the border wall, razor wire barriers and National Guard on the border.”
None of that is what Harris was working on. Her mandate included tackling government corruption, leveraging the public and private sectors to create jobs, and improving food security in the region. However well-intentioned and potentially successful that mission could be, such a longterm strategy could hardly meet the moment facing the Biden administration from the beginning: an increasingly worldwide migration movement bringing people from around the globe, not just the Northern Triangle, to the US-Mexico border. That is not to say that Harris did not play the part of telling would-be migrants, “do not come.”
That nuance has been lost on Republicans committed to making immigration a salient issue to run on ahead of November. They needed to find another culprit for a “border crisis” they claim to want to solve (while boycotting a bipartisan effort to pass one of the most restrictive immigration overhauls in decades). The strategy? To direct their “open border” attacks on Harris and paint her as “dangerously liberal” and incompetent. On Sunday, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said she would introduce a resolution “condemning Kamala Harris’ role as Joe Biden’s ‘Border czar’ leading to the most catastrophic open border crisis in history.”
As Christian Paz noted in a Vox article, Republicans have long dubbed Harris the “border czar,” in part as a result of the Biden administration’s inability to communicate the extent of her role. The vice president had faced criticism for not having been to the border until June 2021, and for seemingly dismissing questions about it. “We are going to the border,” she said when NBC’s Lester Holt asked her about such plans. “We’ve been to the border.” After he pressed more, she said, “And I haven’t been to Europe.”
Harris is the daughter of immigrants; her father moved to the United States from Jamaica and her mother from India. Before becoming vice president, in her role as attorney general of California, as well as in the senate, Harris built a reputation as a strong advocate for undocumented immigrants. As a prosecutor, she supported requirements for law enforcement to help undocumented immigrant victims of crimes qualify for special visas and opposed federal legislation that would have criminalized providing assistance to unauthorized immigrants. (One infamous difference was in 2008: In her role as district attorney of San Francisco, she stood by a policy by Gavin Newsom, then the city’s mayor, requiring local law enforcement to report undocumented youth to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Newsom later admitted the policy was wrong.)
Shortly after Trump enacted a travel ban on citizens from Muslim-majority countries, Harris introduced her first bill as a senator, which would give immigrants detained while trying to enter the country access to lawyers. She has also publicly supported the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that protects from deportation undocumented youth brought to the United States as children. In 2017, Harris was the first Democratic senator to vow to oppose spending bill negotiations unless Congress acted to protect the so-called Dreamers. That move, Vox wrote at the time, “helped cement Harris’s burgeoning reputation as the most outspoken ally of immigration activists on the Hill.”
In 2018, Harris grilled then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen over the “zero tolerance” policy and the Trump administration’s move to rescind DACA. “When you’re separating children from their parents do you have a protocol in place about how that should be done?” Harris asked Nielsen during a congressional hearing. “And are you training the people who will actually remove a child from their parent on how to do that in the least traumatic way? I would hope you do.” Later, she joined other Democrats in the Senate in introducing legislation to expedite the process of reunifying separated migrant families. Six years later, families torn apart have yet to be reunited.
As a candidate and potential future president, Harris will have to contend with the mixed-bag immigration policies of the Biden administration. But some pro-immigrant groups are willing to bet on her. “Harris has been instrumental in advancing policies to protect Dreamers and immigrant families, investing in solutions to address the root causes of migration, and holding accountable Trump and Republicans for their devastating policies that wrecked families and our immigration system,” Kerri Talbot, executive director of the Immigration Hub, said in a statement. “We know what’s at stake—from mass deportation to family separation.”
