Early last week, just hours after Joe Biden ended his reëlection bid, Republican lawmakers received a stern memo from the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Party’s main campaign arm in the House. “Republicans have never had less time to define the presidential nominee of our opponents,” the memo read, according to a copy obtained by Punchbowl News. “It is vital that our entire Conference is on message.” Democrats had quickly rallied around the candidacy of Vice-President Kamala Harris, and several Republican members were already experimenting with openly racist attack lines, calling her a “D.E.I. hire.” “I’m not going to get into all the color stuff,” Representative Troy Nehls, a Texas Republican, told reporters, when they asked him whether such remarks were appropriate. Another memo, which included additional lists of talking points, started with a more conventional subject line: “Joe Biden & Kamala Harris’ Border Crisis.”
Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, had already announced her plan to file an emergency resolution “condemning Kamala Harris’ role as Joe Biden’s ‘Border czar’ leading to the most catastrophic open border crisis in history.” Many Democrats pointed out that Harris never held such a job. The title didn’t even exist. In response, after Stefanik drafted the resolution, she and her Republican colleagues edited it, saying that Harris “came to be known colloquially as the Biden administration’s ‘border czar.’ ” The rest of the resolution is replete with falsehoods, misrepresentations, and other inanities. At one point, its authors claim that border crossings in May, 2024, were “higher than even the highest month seen under President Trump,” which is untrue. They also cite the chief of Border Patrol, who had “stated that Vice President Kamala Harris has not spoken with him since he was appointed in July 2023”; this simply proves the point that she was not, in fact, in charge of the border. On Thursday, in a party-line vote scheduled before the House adjourns for its August recess, Republicans passed the measure. It is purely symbolic.
The immigration issue has long been a source of political vulnerability for the Biden Administration. Polls show that Americans are concerned about chaos at the border, and that they rank it as one of the most pressing threats facing the country. Until recently, owing to the explosiveness of the subject, the White House has preferred to avoid talking about it. On Wednesday night, in a televised address from the Oval Office, Biden noted, accurately, that unauthorized border crossings are now lower than they’d been when Donald Trump left office. (According to data obtained by CBS News, Border Patrol is on pace to arrest fewer than sixty thousand migrants in July, which would be the lowest number of monthly apprehensions since September, 2020.) Yet Republicans, who’ve capitalized on the general perception of mismanagement under Biden, claimed he was lying. “Biden really just said border crossings are lower now than under President Trump,” Representative August Pfluger, of Texas, said on X. “First we’re supposed to believe Kamala was never the border czar and now this??”
To answer Plfuger’s question, in a word: yes. The number of crossings has dropped significantly in the past five months, owing mostly to increased efforts by the Mexican government to arrest migrants before they reach the U.S. 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. At no point in her tenure as Vice-President has she been in charge of managing the border.
On the eve of the House vote, I spoke with the person whose job came the closest to the one that Stefanik and others have misattributed to Harris: Roberta Jacobson, a former Ambassador to Mexico who, for the first three months of Biden’s term, served as the coördinator for the southwest border at the National Security Council. “My purpose was to reëstablish the interagency mechanism for making decisions about the southwest border and immigration,” she told me. Part of what makes the border so difficult to control is that the task combines domestic and foreign policy, which involve different branches of the federal bureaucracy. Jacobson’s remit was to serve as a point person for the President, convening regular meetings with officials at the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Health and Human Services, and Defense, then reporting them up the chain at the White House. “The process for making decisions didn’t exist when we came in,” she said. “It was calls with Stephen Miller in which he yelled at the career officials, and they went off to do what he said, or to try.”
Within two months of Biden taking office, thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America started crossing the border. The government didn’t have enough space to hold all of them as it arranged for sponsors to provide housing inside the country. By late March, there were eighteen thousand children in U.S. custody, and more than five thousand of them were being kept in borderland holding cells. It was the first political crisis of Biden’s Presidency. The atmosphere inside the Administration was tense. “There was a real, active debate between people from the advocacy community and the operational teams watching the trend lines,” Ricardo Zúñiga, a former State Department official who served as Biden’s envoy to Central America, told me. “This was right in the middle of unwinding Trump-era policy. . . . Every snippet of messaging coming out of the United States was being misused by migrant smugglers.”
Biden, as Vice-President, had travelled to Central America during Barack Obama’s second term as part of a broader initiative to address border arrivals at their origin point. “He was not just proud of it—he thought it made a real difference. And it did,” Zúñiga said. As President, Biden assigned a similar role to Harris. “He saw it as a good thing,” Andrea Flores, a border expert at the N.S.C. under Biden, told me. “That made sense in 2014 and 2015. It didn’t make sense in 2021. All eyes were on the border. It was a day-to-day, on-the-ground operational emergency. She was set up to fail, because by now the issue was about so much more than root causes.”
If anyone saw the looming political peril at the time, it was Harris herself. Dealing with “root causes” was, by definition, slow and strategic work—essential from a policy perspective but politically inopportune. Positive results could take many years to materialize. “Harris was resigned to the assignment,” Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns write in “This Will Not Pass,” their book about the early days of the Biden Presidency. “She would take on the Northern Triangle, traveling to Central America and negotiating with governments there, but under no circumstances did she want to be branded Biden’s border ‘czar.’ ’’ At a meeting with the President and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, that April, Harris corrected Biden when he said she’d do a “hell of a job” on immigration. Her brief, she added, was the Northern Triangle, not immigration.
Harris’s most immediate dilemma, when she took on the role, was that there were few leaders in the region whom she could talk to. The President of Honduras at the time, Juan Orlando Hernández, was under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration. (He is now serving a forty-five-year sentence in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.) Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian leader of El Salvador, who’d had a strong relationship with the Trump Administration, was increasingly at odds with Biden over corruption in the Salvadoran government and a pattern of anti-democratic behavior. That left the regime of Alejandro Giammattei, of Guatemala, a former surgeon whose conservative administration was notorious for its ties to special interests. In fact, Guatemala’s attorney general had been targeting prosecutors and judges who were involved in the state’s own fight against corruption, in many instances arresting and jailing them. Nearly two dozen of the country’s top legal minds were eventually forced into exile.
In May, 2021, a month before Harris was due to travel to Guatemala, she convened a meeting in Washington with a group of exiled jurists, all women, who’d been involved in combating corruption in Guatemala. “At this table are attorneys who have prosecuted drug traffickers and organized crime,” Harris said. “At this table are judges who have advocated for an independent judiciary and the rule of law.” She added that “injustice is a root cause of migration” and that “corruption is preventing people from getting basic services.” One of the lawyers in attendance was Thelma Aldana, a former attorney general of Guatemala who was forced out of the country as she prepared to launch a Presidential campaign of her own. “I left the meeting with Harris feeling very optimistic,” Aldana told me. “She was a prosecutor, too, and we understood each other well.”