A Democrat in Congress whose home district in Texas along the Mexico border is being hit hard by the impact of Joe Biden’s southern border crisis says he wants Vice President Kamala Harris removed from her post as “border czar.”
Biden named her to that responsibility months ago, after hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens started flooding the border in response to his decisions to eliminate essentially all of the border security efforts started by President Trump.
Those included canceling construction of a border wall, and a requirement that those seeking asylum remain in Mexico while their cases were processed.
Harris, however, has done little on the topic besides taking a trip to Central America and telling people they should stay there. She’s never even visited the actual border, having only made a drop-in stop at a fairly distant Texas city.
Now Just the News is reporting that Rep. Henry Cuellar, a longtime Democrat in Congress representing some of those border regions, wants her out.
“I’ve moved on from the vice president to say, ‘OK, let’s work with the ambassadors and let’s work with the State Department. Let’s work with the Homeland Secretary,'” Cuellar said. “I think that’s the way to address it, but I know that the media has put a lot of focus on the vice president. But with all due respect, she was given that title. I don’t think she’s, with all due respect, put the effort in there … .We’ve got to look at other folks that have the expertise on that.”
His district includes regions from San Antonio to Rio Grande City.
Biden appointed Harris to that responsibility last winter but she frittered away months before eventually visiting El Paso, which is 800 miles from the Rio Grande Valley and the center of the problem.
The White House claims she’s working on the “root” causes of the illegal immigration, and that included her southern trip to tell people to stay there.
Her approval rating recently was measured at only 28%, at least partly because of her lack of work on the border.
Illegal aliens apprehended at the border in October were up 128% from a year earlier, and to date more than 1.7 million have been “encountered” there in this year.
Harris has continued to skate around the responsibility, recently announcing plans to travel to Europe, without visiting the actual southern border yet. She also recently skipped a border security meeting to visit a New Jersey daycare instead.
She has taken a bashing from commentators on the problem. When she recently claimed the “root causes” of the problem must be addressed, including corruption in Central America, violence, trafficking, poverty and even “extreme” weather conditions, John Daniel Davidson, the political editor at The Federalist, responded.
Fine ideas, he said, it’s just that they’re like saying “of course we need to change our strategic policy toward China, but we have to establish a missile base on Mars first.”
“In just five months, it seems Vice President Kamala Harris has managed to crack the code on illegal immigration. All we have to do to ensure that Central Americans stop illegally crossing our border is to transform the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador into stable, prosperous democracies. That’s it! That’s the answer!” he wrote.
“So many Central Americans come to the United States illegally, it turns out, … because their countries are plagued by poverty, crime, corruption, and violence. Solve those problems and bang! — you solve illegal immigration,” he wrote sarcastically.
“It’s hard to overstate the Biden administration’s fundamental unseriousness about all this, whether it be root causes of migration or the border itself. Every step of the way, Harris has shown a mixture of dismissiveness and incuriosity in her role as Biden’s ‘border czar.’ After a quick jaunt to Mexico and Guatemala last month, and an even more superficial stopover in El Paso (which lasted a few hours and didn’t include a visit to the physical border), Harris has now released what amounts to a list of warmed-over platitudes about creating opportunity and fighting corruption in Central America,” he wrote.
Her ideas include, “addressing poverty, fighting corruption, promoting human rights, fighting crime, and combating violence.”
“There’s nothing wrong with these as overarching goals, but one must be realistic about the enormity of the task at hand, and cognizant of what’s been tried before — and failed. If this strategy document is any indication, no one in the Biden administration is being the least bit realistic here,” he said.
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