As the border crisis spirals out of control and the Biden administration faces scrutiny on both sides of the aisle, President Biden decides to take it seriously.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas proved to be completely incapable of dealing with the “challenging situation” he believed he had “under control.” His brilliant strategy so far included begging the migrants not to come; having children spending days in crowded holding cells while waiting to be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement; releasing migrants into the United States without a court date; releasing migrants with COVID into the United States; and blaming Trump — a lot. Biden himself tried to help by providing the migrants with hotel rooms and comprehensive healthcare services while halting the construction of the border wall.
Despite this enormous effort, all of these approaches, for some reason, did not produce results other than attracting even more migrants. Obviously, the situation requires a true professional heavyweight and a mastermind on immigration. Enter Kamala Harris.
On Wednesday, the better part of the Biden-Harris administration was entrusted to lead the efforts to address a record surge in migrants at the U.S. southern border.
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“I can think of nobody who is better qualified to do this,” the president believes. “When she speaks, she speaks for me. She doesn’t have to check with me. She knows what she’s doing,” Biden said, pointing to Harris’ experience as California attorney general, where she did a “great deal for human rights” while “fighting organized crime.”
It all sounds peachy, but reservations one might have about Harris succeeding in this role is that:
a.) Her lax stance on the immigration and border security would undermine the effort. Yes, this is the same Kamala Harris who compared ICE to KKK, implying that the agency’s enforcement of immigration laws were motivated by racial animus; and the same Harris who doesn’t believe people should be deported for violating U.S. border law. She boasted that as California’s attorney general, “I issued a directive to the sheriffs of my state that they did not have to comply with detainers,” and supported “sanctuary cities.”
b.) She doesn’t have any experience in immigration, actually, which makes her unqualified for the task.
The degree to which Harris is clueless on how to deal with the challenge was on display during her interview with CBS This Morning. The vice president admitted, “Well, okay, look, it’s a huge problem. I’m not gonna pretend it’s not, it’s a huge problem.” “Are we looking at overcrowding at the border, particularly these kids? Yes. Should these kids be in the custody of HHS, the Health and Human Services, instead of the Border Patrol? Yes. Should we be processing these cases faster? Yes.”
Harris went on to reiterate that she still believed the blame for the chaos on President Trump: “There are things that we need to do, especially since there was a system in place — previously, before the last administration — to allow us to process these kids in their country of origin. That was dismantled, we have to reconstruct it. It’s not going to happen overnight.” Interestingly, during her own presidential campaign, Harris knocked Obama’s deportation policy.
Notably, Obama was not a softie on immigrants who tried to cross the border. One may recall that under Obama, immigration enforcement combined two approaches: one for those caught near the border, the other for immigrants found living illegally in the interior. How long an immigrant has been here made a difference, as well.
Like others before it, the Obama administration admitted having neither the resources nor the desire to deport millions of immigrants “whose only crime was entering the country illegally.” His DACA program was praised as a “legacy-defining” executive action that opened up broad horizons for thousands of young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as young children. At the same time, Obama was called a “deporter-in-chief” by his critics in the “immigrant-rights” community for his record on deportations. Obama focused the enforcement efforts on those caught near the border (the family separation had been practiced, too), those who’ve committed crimes in addition to border jumping, and those who appear to have arrived in 2014 or later. According to a report from the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, “At the border, there is a near zero tolerance system, where unauthorized immigrants are increasingly subject to formal removal and criminal charges. Within the country, there is greater flexibility.” Please take a note, VP Harris, “zero tolerance.”
What did Trump do differently? The first thing that comes to mind is a revamped asylum-seeking process. The Trump administration installed the following:
• Denying asylum to people who did not ask for protection in another country first;
• Establishing agreements with Central American countries to admit asylum seekers who would have otherwise applied for protection in the United States; and
• Launching the “Remain in Mexico” program that sent asylum seekers to Mexico to wait there for a resolution of their case. It had helped end the practice of “catch-and-release” and also helped end a pull factor that was drawing migrants north. Previous administrations allowed people into the United States as their case made its way through the immigration system.
The Biden-Harris administration effectively canceled all of those protective measures they deemed “immoral,” and now they send U.S. senior administration officials to Mexico and Guatemala to talk solutions and address the “root causes” of migration. That is, economic problems, ongoing violence, worsening corruption, and challenges to “democracy.”
During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged to develop a comprehensive rescue plan for Central America’s Northern Triangle worth $4 billion. But there’s a small problem: Giving money to the countries that are plagued with corruption is like fighting fire with gasoline. The aid programs are to be expected from the “nice guy” Biden, but they will not be enough to foster sustained improvement in governance and prosperity.
As CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King put it perfectly, “if you’re going to change the Trump policy, the previous policy, at least have a game plan. And there doesn’t appear right now to be a game plan.”
