Remember when the Republicans got fact-checked to oblivion by every mainstream outlet and apparent media watchdog over Vice President Kamala Harris supposedly being named the “border czar?”
This was just one of the statements that sent that professional class of liberal fig leaf-painters into a tizzy, from Donald Trump’s campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt: “Border Czar Kamala Harris’ reversal of President Trump’s immigration policies has created an unprecedented and illegal immigration, humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border,” she told PolitiFact.
PolitiFact, and others, were having none of it.
“‘Border czar’? Kamala Harris assigned to tackle immigration’s causes, not border security,” PolitiFact’s headline declared. “Republicans call Harris a failed border czar. The facts tell a different story,” Reuters’ read. “President Biden did not assign her the job title of ‘border czar’ or the responsibility of overseeing the enforcement policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, as the Trump campaign suggested on Tuesday in its first ad against her,” The New York Times reported in July.
The only way this is slightly true is that there is no position called “border czar.” In fact, if you aren’t reading this from Russia circa 1910, there aren’t too many official czars, period.
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The term, as used in American politics, is generally given to someone who has a wide, if unofficial, purview over a certain policy matter — drug czar, climate czar, and border czar, for instance, are among unofficial “czardoms” that have been created, but which aren’t actual titles.
In this case, though, the media insisted Kamala didn’t qualify, noting that the Biden administration didn’t give her significant purview over stopping the record influx of illegal immigrants, merely of addressing the “root causes” of it.
From the Times: “Early in the administration, Ms. Harris was given a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fund-raiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her attempt to convince companies across the world to invest in Central America and create jobs for would-be migrants had some success, according to immigration experts and current and former government officials.
“But those successes only underlined the scale of the gulf in economic opportunity between the United States and Central America, and how policies to narrow that gulf could take years or even generations to show results.”
Do we need a border wall?
Herein lies the fact-check of the fact-checkers, however: Note how the Times says that Harris “was given a role” in addressing vague root causes of illegal immigration. The problem is, that limited role was given to Harris more or less by Harris herself, in contrast to the wider role that President Joe Biden seemed to provide her with, at least publicly.
For instance, here’s the president on March 24, 2021, assigning Harris the job:
UNREAL. Kamala is blaming Trump for the border crisis.
Here’s the video of her being appointed border czar and accepting the position.
Would be a shame if this went viral pic.twitter.com/OJEx80LtX4
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 11, 2024
That resurfaced last week on X, formerly Twitter, and it definitely did go viral.
“I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” Biden said, according to a White House transcript.
“I can think of nobody who — who is better qualified to do this than a former — this is a woman who ran the second-largest attorney general’s office in America — after the U.S. — after the United States attorney general — in the state of California, and has done a great deal upholding human rights, but also fighting organized crime in the process,” he noted later.
“So it’s not her full responsibility and job, but she’s leading the effort because I think the best thing to do is to put someone who, when he or she speaks, they don’t have to wonder about is that where the President is,” Biden said. “When she speaks, she speaks for me. She doesn’t have to check with me.”
The full clip:
If the words “border czar” weren’t in there, they were certainly implied: Harris was being given extremely wide latitude over how to handle the border security situation.
This, the president said, was because he could think of no one “who is better qualified to do this.” What he probably meant — or, at least, whoever was behind this setup probably meant — was that they could think of no one more convenient to pawn off an unsolvable problem on than the vice president.
After all, Biden came into office promising not to pursue his predecessor’s border security tactics. He even tried to focus on an amnesty bill during his first few months in office until he realized it was deader than dead upon arrival. At the same time, he saw the eye-popping Border Patrol encounter numbers and knew that something had to look like it was being done.
The perfect person for the job, naturally, is someone who doesn’t have to seek election in another few years — or, at least, who you don’t want seeking election in another few years, because that means they’re after your job.
Give her this much credit, no matter what your opinion of her: Harris is not so dim as to not see such a set-up coming, and so she decided to do what was in her best interest to do as “border czar” — namely, as little as possible. Her efforts on the “root causes” of migration in Northern Triangle countries produced little in the way of palpable results — and those didn’t matter, anyhow, since the tides of illegal immigration soon shifted away from those countries and toward other nations, particularly the failed states of Haiti and Venezuela.
Now, if Harris was a go-getter who realized that she’d been handed a shovel and shown to an Augean stable but that she should make the best of a bad situation and start cleaning it out, she could (and would) have done so. Instead, she covered her posterior with vague promises of abstract results sometime in the distant future — and the border crisis intensified until the Biden administration, suddenly noticing the poll numbers several years too late, began pretending to care.
So, yes, she was the “border czar,” such as one exists. Yes, Harris quickly realized that she was hemmed in by progressive immigration activists on one side and reality on the other. And, yes, she chose to do the best thing possible for her and the worst thing possible for America: nothing of substance.
It would, indeed, be a shame for Vice President Harris if voters were to remember that, instead of what they’re being told by the establishment media about the “border czar” narrative.
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