On March 24, 2021, Axios reported, “Biden puts Harris in charge of the border crisis.” The same day, The New York Times stated that Biden “gave the vice president a prominent role in the politically charged issue.” Numerous other legacy media outlets called Kamala Harris the “border czar” and heralded her prominent role.
At the time of the appointment, Joe Biden himself said, “So it’s not her full responsibility and job, but she’s leading the effort,” and “When she speaks, she speaks for me. Doesn’t have to check with me. She knows what she’s doing.”
But corporate media have engaged in a complete about-face this past week, now decrying the use of the term “border czar” and minimizing Harris’ role in the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the border. USA Today stated that “Harris was never put in charge of the border or made ‘border czar,’ immigration experts said.” Time declared, “Kamala Harris Was Never Biden’s ‘Border Czar.’ Here’s What She Really Did.” As my colleague Jordan Boyd detailed, Axios even reneged on its own 2021 coverage of Harris as border czar in the rush to exonerate Harris of culpability in the illegal immigration crisis.
The media’s about-face comes not as a result of a change in facts (in which case a reversal would not only be justified but necessary) but because of a change in circumstances. When Biden dropped out of the race, it became politically inconvenient for Harris to be associated with the immigration policy failures of the administration in which she serves.
In essence, the media pivoted because Harris has a messaging problem. But it’s not “a narrative problem” drummed up by right-wing misinformation. Harris has a problem because the Biden-Harris administration’s border policy has largely been viewed as a complete failure.
As recently as Wednesday evening, Biden touted his border record (as have the media), citing lower illegal immigration numbers. But even this perceived victory is ambiguous at best. Historically, border encounters have dipped during the hotter summer months, so this is an expected statistical variation rather than a sign of policy success.
In addition, Biden claimed that border encounters are currently lower than when Trump left office, which is false. Encounters in both December 2020 (40,565) and January 2021 (78,414) were fewer than the 83,536 encounters the Border Patrol reported in June 2024 (the lowest number of Biden’s presidency). More importantly, as Newsweek reports, June encounters were still “nearly double the average of monthly apprehensions during the Trump administration.”
Beyond the baggage of the Biden-Harris administration’s failures, Harris now faces a second messaging problem, this one related to the media’s latest propaganda campaign. The media, as described above, emphasized Harris’ “border czar” role when Biden gave it to her but are now saying her role was quite limited.
This raises a sticky question: Did Harris shoulder the weight of real responsibility as a second-in-command of the Biden-Harris administration, or is the jab that “she actually wasn’t in charge of anything” closer to describing reality? In other words, if her role in stemming illegal immigration (one of her most publicized responsibilities) wasn’t substantial enough for her to bear any responsibility for the immigration failure, how can she argue that her experience in the Biden-Harris administration prepared her for the presidency?
Media outlets argue that Harris’ job wasn’t nonexistent, but limited — limited to addressing “root causes” in three specific countries. Technically true. But both Biden and Harris have championed the “root causes” strategy as an integral part of their approach to immigration, and it was Harris who released a comprehensive “root causes” plan in July 2021. Harris was on a “root causes” campaign trip to Central America when Lester Holt asked Harris why she hadn’t been to the border. She said, “We’ve been to the border” three times before admitting that she hadn’t. While she did argue that her specific focus was “root causes,” this would have been the perfect opportunity for Harris (or Holt) to clarify that she wasn’t the border czar, that she didn’t have enough power to make necessary changes, that she disagreed with Biden on border policy, and so forth. She didn’t.
Of course, it would be unexpected for Harris to openly criticize her own administration’s policies while still vice president, but without such a critique, voters are justified in assuming that Harris will carry on Biden’s disastrous border policies — that is, unless her record prior to serving in the Biden-Harris administration indicates otherwise. It does not, which is Harris’ third messaging problem.
Harris’ third (and most difficult) messaging problem is tied to her own rhetoric and record on illegal immigration. Harris has stated repeatedly that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal,” which logically leads to her conclusion that “we’re not going to treat people who are undocumented and cross the border as criminals.” Harris doesn’t believe that immigration laws should be enforced, in other words. In 2018, Harris compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Ku Klux Klan in a Senate confirmation hearing. When asked about abolishing ICE in 2019, she said that “we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE” and “we need to probably think about starting from scratch.” Beyond this, Harris has stated that she is “opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.”
The Time article aimed at debunking Harris’ status as border czar claimed she “has a broader record on immigration, including backing a bipartisan border-security deal aimed at reducing border crossings earlier this year.” But that bill still allowed “a flood of aliens” to enter the country, as The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland makes clear.
In addition, Time notes that “as Senator, [Harris] was an outspoken advocate of legal protections for DACA recipients, made headlines for aggressively questioning Trump immigration officials, and derided the then-President’s border wall as a ‘medieval vanity project,’” but these examples detract from Harris’ credibility on immigration rather than bolstering it. When it comes to her relationship with the U.S. Border Patrol, Harris was quick to wrongfully denounce agents accused of whipping illegal immigrants, and she failed to meet with Border Patrol chiefs during her tenure as vice president.
Harris’ vulnerability on immigration is critical because Americans have consistently ranked immigration as the most important issue in the months leading up to the election. For the first time in almost 20 years, the majority of Americans, 55 percent, are in favor of decreasing the level of immigration. That 55 percent number is up from nearly 41 percent last year — and close to two-thirds have indicated support for mass deportations of illegal immigrants. The gap between the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies (which included a catch-and-release protocol that involved releasing as many as 75 percent of illegal aliens into the U.S.) and the policies most Americans support is vast.
Trump, on the other hand, has been consistent in his opposition to illegal immigration, and his administration was decisively more successful in its efforts to create a secure border, which is what Americans want.
Even if Harris were never appointed border czar, she’s made it clear that her handling of border crisis as chief executive will be just as bad or worse than that of the Biden-Harris administration if she is elected. It’s a reality the media are working hard to obscure.
