EL PASO, Texas – After a barrage of criticism from Republicans for not visiting the southern U.S. border, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to El Paso, Texas, on Friday to meet with migrants.
Harris will take a walking tour of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center and will then meet with advocates from faith-based organizations and shelter and legal service providers.
“What happens at the border matters and is directly connected to what is happening in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. It is directly connected to the work of addressing the root causes of migration,” her senior adviser Symone Sanders said in a Thursday evening media call.
The border visit has done little to silence the vice president’s immigration critics, and Sanders pushed back on suggestions that the trip was in response to Republican criticism following Harris’ trip to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month or to get ahead of former President Donald Trump’s scheduled border visit next week.
“This administration does not take their cues from Republican criticism nor from the former president of the United States of America,” Sanders said.
Harris is leading administration efforts to slow migration to the southern border from Central America through diplomatic means aimed at addressing the root causes of migration and improving the quality of life for residents of those countries.
Republicans have continued to complain that Harris, a former California senator and attorney general, waited too long to travel to the border and would not be going to the area with the most problems. They also questioned whether Harris would have meaningful conversations with Border Patrol agents and said she should meet with landowners, in addition to immigration organizations, and visit holding facilities for migrant children while in Texas.
“I’m glad she’s finally going to the border,” Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told McClatchy. “But I don’t think it’s coincidental that she’s headed to El Paso.”
Cruz pointed out that El Paso was nearly 800 miles from the Rio Grande Valley, where a Border Patrol tent facility for migrant children and families is located. “She doesn’t want the TV cameras to see the kids in cages,” he said.
Others argue that El Paso is an appropriate stop for the vice president to highlight migration issues. The Department of Homeland Security ran a pilot program out of the city in 2017 that served as the basis for the Trump administration’s family separation policy. El Paso is also the site of a mass shooting at a Walmart in 2019 that left a total of 23 people dead. Police say the shooting suspect told them he targeted Mexicans.
“El Paso is on the border. The idea that Ted Cruz gets to say which part of the border is important versus which part of the border she’s going to is just more of the same silly politics and gamesmanship that the GOP has been involved in from day one,” Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration group America’s Voice, said. “It’s beyond parody.”
Sanders said El Paso was chosen because it is representative of the broader border dynamics. She also called the city the “birthplace” of Trump’s family separation policy.
“El Paso has an important story to tell. It is an important part of what is happening at the border writ large and important progress has been made,” Sanders said.
ENCOUNTERS ON THE RISE
Illegal border crossings are on the rise, causing overcrowding in existing border facilities and leading the U.S. government to create temporary shelters for arriving migrants.
Critics of the Biden administration say those problems are a direct result of relaxed restrictions.
The Democratic administration ended a policy put in place under former President Donald Trump that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while they awaited court dates.
The United States currently accepts unaccompanied children into the country, but it turns away most other migrants under a health policy put in place by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that in May, of the 180,034 people it encountered at the southern border, 62% were expelled under the health policy, known as Title 42.
Harris’ visit precedes a trip to the border that Trump intends to make on June 30 with Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Chad Wolf, former acting Homeland Security secretary during the Trump administration and a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that Harris was “cajoled” and “bullied, in a sense” into visiting the border by Trump, Abbott and other Republicans.
“There’s no way she would have gone on her own,” Wolf said. “And so now she’s going. That being said, she should have gone a long time ago. She needs to understand firsthand, she needs to see it and experience it, firsthand what’s going on.”
Wolf said that Harris may not have that experience in El Paso. “It’s probably the easiest stop, but it probably shows you the least about what’s going on in the crisis.”
Sanders told reporters that the timing of the trip was due to the vice president’s schedule and the groups she is meeting.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, will accompany Harris.
Wolf said that having Mayorkas with her would give Harris the opportunity to make the point that she oversees the root causes of migration, while the Homeland Security secretary is in charge of conditions at the border. It is a distinction that Harris’ team and the White House have spent months trying to make.
Sharry said this is “probably the best time and the best way” for Harris to go to the border, but the visit does not alleviate his concerns on immigration and refugee policy.
“She said she would go, she’s checking the box, I think it will make very little difference to anybody. Maybe it will make a difference in terms of how often she’s hounded with the question ‘when are you going to the border?’” he said.
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(McClatchy congressional correspondent David Lightman contributed reporting.)
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