HOUSTON — Kamala Harris made her first trip as vice president to the U.S.-Mexico border Friday, meeting with border agents and migrant children as she toured a processing center in El Paso, and becoming more closely tied to one of the Biden administration’s diciest political problems.
Her visit comes after months of Republicans’ criticism that she and President Joe Biden hadn’t gone to see firsthand the effects of an immigration system overwhelmed by an increase of migrant families and unaccompanied children seeking entry into the United States.
She was accompanied by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, who has been to the border previously. Xavier Becerra, Biden’s health and human services secretary, plans to visit another facility Monday — a tent city for hundreds of children at the Fort Bliss Army Base, where there have been outbreaks of COVID-19 and lice, reports of sexual abuse and other unsafe conditions.
On arriving in El Paso, Harris told reporters that “it was always the plan to come here” as part of her work on diplomacy with Central America.
“We have to deal with causes and we have to deal with the effects,” she said. Her recent trip to Mexico and Guatemala, she added, was about probing the causes of residents’ decisions to migrate north, while her border visit is intended to allow her to see “the effects of what we have seen happening in Central America.”
Harris, who went to the southwest border as a senator and as California’s attorney general, has tried to avoid association with the politics of the border since becoming vice president, hoping to sidestep one of the White House’s potential electoral vulnerabilities.
In addition to touring the facility, Harris met privately with five migrant girls between the ages of 9 and 16. Aides said the girls drew pictures and told the vice president what they wanted to be when they grew up. She also went to a nearby inland port entry, where asylum-seekers coming from Mexico, including unaccompanied children, are screened for the first time.
During the tour, Harris told Mayorkas, “Mr. Secretary, you’re doing a great job.”
The Biden administration is facing a number of tough policy decisions as it continues to balance efforts to deter migrants with promises of a more humane system of processing those making the journey. Mayorkas told reporters traveling on Air Force Two that his office is still reviewing how quickly to rescind a Trump-era policy, initiated amid the pandemic, that allows agents to quickly turn away migrants by citing a public health law known as Title 42.
Mayorkas said the decision on whether to end the policy would be based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s assessment of public health data and the threat of spreading COVID-19.
Harris’ role in immigration policy dates to March, when Biden asked her to examine ways to deter migration through Mexico from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador by attacking its “root causes,” including corruption, poverty and gang violence — problems that have been exacerbated by devastating hurricanes and the pandemic.
She visited the capitals of Guatemala and Mexico this month to confer with their leaders, seek to spur investment and discourage corruption in the region, but those diplomatic activities were overshadowed by the questions raised back in the United States about her purported reluctance to visit the border.
White House officials said Harris, who vowed during the trip to visit the border soon, did not go to Texas in response to the partisan pressure, including former President Donald Trump’s announcement that he would visit a border site with Republican members of Congress next week.
Biden, asked Thursday about Harris’ visit as she stood beside him at the White House, suggested that her trip is part of a logical sequence.
“The reason why it’s important that she go down, she has now set up the criteria — having spoken with the presidents of Mexico and Guatemala, visited the region — to know what we need to do.”
Republicans say the administration is looking at the wrong causes. They say the reason migrants are coming is because Biden has relaxed some — though not all — of Trump’s hard-line policies and stopped construction of a border wall.
From the administration’s vantage point, El Paso was an appealing destination. The largest city on the long Texas border, it’s a military outpost but also a Democratic college town and a bastion of liberal activism for immigrant rights. It is also home to the locally popular former congressman, Senate candidate and presidential aspirant Beto O’Rourke and to Democratic U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, who was traveling with the vice president.
El Paso also was the first place where the Trump administration began separating children and parents who crossed the border, one of the former president’s most reviled policies.
Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, said, “El Paso has an incredibly rich civil society, with many organizations and experts who’ve done decades of work on asylum, holding Border Patrol accountable, rescuing migrants in danger, and caring for asylum seekers. They have a lot of constructive things to say about what a better border security and migration policy would look like.”
Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who has been urging Harris to go to the border, said El Paso is “politically safer to go to than the Rio Grande Valley, where you can see unaccompanied kids, family units, and where you get most of the single adults that are coming in.”
Republicans would rather focus on increased migrant traffic and gaps in the border wall to the west and east of El Paso, in the Valley. The Republican National Committee taunted Harris in a news release Thursday, questioning whether she knows “where the crisis is?”
Last month in Yuma, Arizona, the Border Patrol encountered 12,014 migrants, compared with 745 in May 2020. To the east, in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, long a hot spot for smugglers moving people and drugs, officials recorded 50,793 migrants encountered, compared with 3,698 in May 2020.
Migrant numbers dropped off sharply in 2020 amid the pandemic, when the United States, like many other countries, restricted entry. In 2021, the numbers began to increase.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who vows to complete the border wall construction that made little progress in his state under Trump, plans to host the former president in the Rio Grande Valley on Wednesday for a “security briefing” and “border wall tour.”
Some progressive activists in the Rio Grande Valley also expressed disappointment that Harris and Mayorkas were visiting El Paso, where far fewer asylum-seeking families have been forced by U.S. policies to wait just over the border.
Karla Vargas, an attorney with the Valley-based Texas Civil Rights Project, said during a Thursday briefing: “We would have hoped they would have tried to also visit this area to see how difficult it is for the families waiting here. We welcome them trying to address this. We hope it is not just showmanship.”
