As Vice President Kamala Harris nears securing the Democratic nomination for the presidency, some on the left are working to downplay her record of shortcomings at the southern border.
Despite being called the “border czar,” officials now claim that the title was never official and that Kamala Harris was not responsible for addressing the influx of millions of illegal immigrants into the country. However, it was indeed her role, and former colleagues are now speaking out about her poor performance.
Brandon Judd, recently retired as president of the Border Patrol Union, spoke out about working alongside Harris on immigration issues, Fox News reported.
“It’s very disappointing. We gave her the policies that she needed to implement. She refused to implement those,” he said.
According to numbers reported by Fox, while Judd was working with Harris, border crossings hit record highs in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Fox reported that in 2021, 41 percent of border apprehensions were from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. By the 2023 fiscal year, that figure had decreased to 21 percent.
While apprehensions of illegal immigrants from those countries have decreased, this statistic alone does not necessarily indicate a drop in the overall number of people from these countries entering the United States.
Furthermore, that could also be taken to mean that the number of illegal immigrants from other countries rose — drastically.
Under President Joe Biden’s “Root Causes” executive order, Kamala Harris was tasked with addressing the reasons why illegal immigrants from these Northern Triangle countries were overwhelming the border.
Harris negotiated in June 2021 to send $4 billion to Central American countries to address the root causes of illegal immigration during a visit to Mexico, which also resulted in private companies investing an additional $5.2 billion in those countries.
However, she has not been to the border or any of these countries since January 2022.
No new commitments have been made, and illegal immigration continues to be a major problem.
As Judd stated, Harris failed to grasp the underlying issues driving the surge in migration.
“The major problem is the root causes she identified: political instability, climate and crime,” he told Fox.
“That was the same under President Trump, yet we did not see an explosion in illegal immigration under the Trump administration,” he added.
“She has not addressed any of the root causes, and she refuses to recognize what the actual root causes are,” Judd said.
“If she would have dealt with what she identified, we would have less illegal immigration, but she didn’t even deal with those causes that she identified,” he continued.
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