JD Vance: The Media Lies to Hide Kamala Harris’s Role as ‘Border Czar’

The establishment media is lying about Vice President Kamala Harris’s do-nothing record since President Joe Biden promoted her to border czar, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) declared in a speech on the border.

“When the media lies about Kamala Harris [not] being the border czar, here’s what they’re lying about,” Vance told the press conference in Cochise County, Arizona:

You cannot adjust effective border policy unless you have somebody who’s coordinating all the different agencies of the U.S. federal government. You need the State Department involved to send people back to their home countries. You need the Department of Justice involved to prosecute these terrible drug crimes. And of course, you need DHS [Department of Homeland Security] involved so that the Border Patrol is empowered to do their job. Kamala Harris, as border czar, was asked [by Biden] to coordinate all these functions of government, and she’s done nothing.

Vance earlier met with local officials and then asked them if Harris had listened to their pleas for law enforcement at the border:

Let’s play devil’s advocate here. Tell me, has Kamala Harris done anything you’ve asked her to do? She is the border czar. Has your border czar done anything you’ve asked her to do? And the answer is no. They send letters, they make phone calls. They are begging the American president and vice president for leadership, and their own border czar ignores them. That is a scandal, that is a disgrace. And to every American watching this, it will stop — but only if you elect Donald J. Trump president.

Vance has repeatedly called for the nation’s pro-migrant, pro-employer migration policy to be shifted in favor of a migration policy that helps ordinary Americans.

In March 2021, Biden tasked Harris with a wide range of border duties, prompting many media outlets — including CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and ABC — to describe her as a “border czar.” (This month, when that moniker appeared to hurt Harris’s chances in the presidential race, those same outlets announced that “border czar” was never her title.”)

In the 2021 meeting, Biden said:

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 [other] countries that help—are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border … When she speaks, she speaks for me. Doesn’t have to check with me. She knows what she’s doing, and I hope we can move this along. [Emphasis added]

“The Vice President has agreed … to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders,” Biden told the cameras he invited for the occasion. [Emphasis added]

The meeting also included Biden’s border chief, the pro-migration, Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas.

Harris responded to Biden’s wide-reaching commission by focussing on the “root causes” of migration:

Well, thank you, Mr. President, and for having the confidence in me. And there’s no question that this is a challenging situation … And while we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law and that we also—because we can chew gum and walk at the same time—must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek, as the president has described, to come here. [Emphasis added]

Biden did not use the “root causes” term, nor did he limit her mission to just migration from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

“Kamala Harris needs to change course on this crazy border mess”. — JD Vance in Cochise County, AZ pic.twitter.com/D1ZY8BGn8R

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) August 1, 2024

However, many pro-Democratic media insist that Biden directed Harris to handle just the “root causes” of migration from the three smaller countries.

“As for Harris, in early 2021, she was tasked with addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration from the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador,” said an article by Jonathan Blitzer at the New Yorker magazine.

CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reported, “White House officials quickly worked to get Harris up to speed after she was assigned to tackle the root causes of migration.”

The Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler, reported on July 31 that “President Biden assigned Harris to take charge of the ‘root causes’ strategy — essentially a diplomatic effort with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to stem migration from those countries.”

The Washington Post’s Liz Goodwin reported that Harris has received an onslaught of criticism for her role, assigned by Biden, seeking to combat the root causes of migration to the United States from Central America, with Republicans calling her Biden’s “border czar.” 

“The media needs to tell the truth and Kamala Harris needs to change course on this crazy border mess,” Vance responded on Thursday.

He said:

This human toll of this is the thing that we cannot forget. We have got kids who can’t learn in schools because their kids have been overwhelmed with migrant children who shouldn’t be there. We’ve got hospitals where the wait times have exploded because illegal aliens are standing in front of the line of American citizens … The people who suffer the most are the people who can least afford to suffer.

Vance’s focus on Harris’s migration record makes electoral sense because many swing voters are ambivalent about Harris’s record.

A late July poll by Rasmussen Reports shows that 56 percent of potential swing voters consider the border to be a migrant crisis, but 16 percent said they were “not sure.” Also, while 42 percent of the swing voters said her record was “poor,” roughly 20 percent of all swing voters only deemed Harris’s record to be “fair,” or somewhat negative.

Since the inauguration, Harris has not resisted the pro-migration policies pushed by Biden’s powerful deputies.

In June 2021, Harris echoed pro-migration themes touted by Mayorkas, saying, “The President and I are absolutely committed to ensuring that our immigration system is orderly and humane, and I do believe that we are making progress in that regard.”

Since 2021, Myorkas has opened “orderly and humane” gaps in the border for at least one million economic migrants who take wages that would otherwise have gone to American families. He also suggests there is no limit to the number of economic migrants he can pull through those pathways.

Since 2021, Mayorkas welcomed roughly ten million legal and illegal migrants into Americans’ communities, workplaces, schools, and hospitals. The inflow adds up to roughly one migrant for every American birth.

That vast population hurts ordinary Americans by dragging down wages, diverting business investment from workplace productivity, and pushing up both housing prices and mortgage rates.