On Tuesday, as Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to the Democratic presidential nomination grew to be all but assured, Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles introduced articles of impeachment centered in part on “the ongoing border crisis, tragically extenuated by the inaction of border czar Kamala Devi Harris.”
“Time and again, Kamala Harris has refused to uphold her oath to the U.S. Constitution, and she must be impeached. Her breathtaking incompetence as Border Czar has allowed a crisis of drugs, rape, and murder to flood the streets of America,” Ogles told the right-wing media outlet the Daily Caller.
Ogles was not alone in focusing his critique of Harris on her role in immigration policy during the Biden administration. In a 25-minute press call on Tuesday alongside one current and one former president of a Border Patrol union, former President Donald Trump opened up his remarks by saying “Harris was appointed border czar, as you know, in March of 2021.”
But that wasn't Harris' role in the administration when it came to immigration.
Harris was never appointed “border czar” and her role in leading aspects of immigration policy for the Biden administration largely focused on diplomatic engagements with officials in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras who, according to President Joe Biden in March 2021, were “going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”
Later that year, Harris was dispatched to Central America for her first foreign trip as vice president and notably told Guatemalans considering the perilous trip north through Mexico and to the United States’ southern border “do not come.”
"The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border," she said in June 2021.
The trip and the comments came amid a record influx of migrants, mostly from Central America, arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum. Her goal, Harris said at the time, was “to deal with the root causes” behind people leaving their home countries. But her mission was focused on diplomacy, not border security and she mostly steered clear of U.S. border policy. In December 2021, she announced at a roundtable of CEOs that $1.2 billion in private investment into Central America had been made in response to her “call to action” in May of that year “as part of her role addressing the root causes of migration from Central America.”
“The President has asked [Homeland Security] Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas to address what is going on at the border,” Harris said in April 2021, when asked by a reporter if she planned on traveling to the United States’ southern border. “I have been asked to lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle, similar to what then-Vice President [Biden] did many years ago.”
During the Obama administration, Biden took on a similar role to the one he tasked Harris with, addressing the poverty and structural issues in the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
As vice president, Harris has visited the U.S-Mexico border area once. And Biden certainly never named her “border czar.” Czar, the English spelling of the title once reserved for Russian and Bulgarian emperors, has been adopted in American politics to title “a special policy advisor who is appointed by the president without congressional oversight, for the purposes of coordinating and centralizing the activities of various executive branch offices,” as University of Chicago political scientist William Howell defined it.
“Border czar, the title, is the title Republicans gave her,” former Obama administration Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said on Fox News on Tuesday. “She assumed the role that Vice President Biden had during the Obama administration, which is diplomacy with Central America. That is a role he had. He gave it to her. She is not the border czar. To the extent there's anybody who's the border czar, it's the secretary of Homeland Security.”
While Harris definitely commented on border policy from time to time and spearheaded efforts to address the underlying economic conditions that often drive Central American asylum seekers to the U.S.-Mexico border, a review of public statements and pool reports shows she discussed the issues sparingly.
Still, Trump and other Republicans continue to falsely claim that Harris led the charge on border policy for the Biden administration, wielding the debate over immigration and border security as a weapon against her newly born presidential campaign.
“Joe Biden put Kamala Harris in charge of the southern border and then we saw the worst invasion of illegals in American history,” Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, wrote on social media on Wednesday. “Kamala failed to secure the border and American citizens paid the price.”
Trump and Vance have also made the case that the record flow of immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration have had deadly costs for the American people, citing high-profile violent crimes by immigrants to the country.
“Countless Americans have been killed by migrant crime because of her willful demolition of American borders and laws,” Trump said on the press call on Tuesday.
While exact data on murders committed by immigrants is not readily available, many studies have found immigrants are less drawn to violent crime than native-born citizens. One published by the National Academy of Sciences, based on Texas Department of Public Safety data from 2012 to 2018, reported native-born U.S. residents were more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes than people in the country illegally.
A study published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private group, found immigrants have been incarcerated at a lower rate than U.S.-born white men since 1960.
Biden has taken action to address border security, including pushing for bipartisan border policy legislation crafted by Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford — one of the Senate’s most conservative members — that was ultimately killed by Trump’s vocal opposition.
In the aftermath of the bipartisan border deal falling apart, Biden took executive action that appears to have significantly stemmed the number of migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border to the lowest level of his presidency last month. However, the policy of closing border crossings often forces migrants to cross into the U.S. along riskier and more dangerous paths on a border the United Nations already calls “the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide on record.”
Before he dropped out and endorsed Harris, Biden’s campaign emphasized Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy promises in appeals to Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities, particularly the former president’s pledge to launch the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.
“To keep our family safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” Trump promised in his Republican National Convention speech. “Even larger than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, from many years ago. You know, he was a moderate but he believed very strongly in borders. He had the largest deportation operation we’ve ever had.”
The result would be millions of Latinos deported, the Biden campaign frequently noted.
But while Biden, and now Harris, have sought to present themselves in a more empathetic light than Trump when it comes to immigration, the Biden administration’s current policies are in some ways similar to Trump’s plans, albeit on a smaller scale.
When Biden took office in 2021, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had around 14,000 migrants in custody. In June of this year, ICE held a daily average of 38,288 migrants in detention facilities, not including the hundreds of migrants living in open-air camps in the desert outside San Diego where food, water, shelter and medical care are severely lacking.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration argued in federal court they had no responsibility to feed or house migrant children in the camps until they’re transferred to official detention. At one camp in San Ysidro, Calif., three migrants died between Oct. 11, 2023, and Feb. 6, according to an immigrant advocacy group.
In her public remarks since announcing her candidacy for president on Sunday, Harris has not mentioned immigration or the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.