Kamala Harris, "Border Czar"

The Media Wants You To Ignore Its Own Reporting

As I speculated during the psychodrama of when/if Joe Biden would withdraw from the 2024 election, Kamala Harris’ work on illegal immigration at the US Southern border is proving a political liability.

Currently, corporate media is diligently working to deny that Kamala Harris was ever actually “border czar”, and that the evil Republicans are trying to create a scandal where none exists.

As a border crisis unfolded only months into Joe Biden’s presidency, he looked to his vice president to help solve an intractable issue: migration.

It seemed like a no-win political assignment. Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff quickly sought to make one thing clear: She wasn’t charged with managing the southern border.

We are supposed to take CNN at its word that Kamala Harris was not given the immigration crisis as a portfolio brief early in the Biden Administration. We are supposed to believe that she was only a minor player in the much larger situation.

As the vice president’s campaign takes shape and as immigration remains a top issue for voters, her team is forced to contend with an assignment that, sources say, has showed early success in Central America as a result of major private-sector investment but that’s been bundled with the administration’s larger migration issues.

All the real problems, you see, took place away from what Harris was asked to do.

Harris’ root cause work dates to March 2021. During an influx of unaccompanied migrant children, Biden tasked the vice president with overseeing diplomatic efforts in Central America, seeing the assignment as a sign of respect, having done the same job himself under former President Barack Obama.

While Harris focused on long-term fixes, the Department of Homeland Security remained responsible for overseeing border security.

At the time, most minors apprehended at the US southern border were from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — a region that was hard-hit by major hurricanes and the Covid-19 pandemic and that had been a main source of migration over the last decade.

As the vice president’s team began strategizing, the problem facing the administration grew. Seven months later, it was migrants arriving from even farther away in South America — outside of Harris’ assigned portfolio — who were overwhelming the Biden administration.

At Axios, the narrative effort also strives to narrow the focus of her duties on immigration.

In early 2021, President Biden enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris to help with a slice of the migration issue — a move that has turned into one of the newly-presumptive presidential nominee's first campaign headaches.

Why it matters: Confusion around the VP's exact role, early media misfires and the rapidly changing regional migration crisis has made the issue a top target for the GOP trying to define their new opponent. And it has become even more critical for Harris' to find a clear border message, fast.

• The administration's early infighting, blame-shifting and indecision around their border response does not help her, either.

Driving the news: In the past few days, the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the "border czar" title — which she never actually had.

There is no doubt that Republicans want to saddle Kamala Harris with the biggest albatross possible from the fiasco that is the southern border. There is also no doubt that there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to things handled poorly at the southern border, and if Kamala Harris can be forced to defend any of it she will take more than a few lumps in the polls.

As I’ve written previously, there are not just issues of national and border security at play, but also appalling humanitarian crises. During the period of Kamala Harris’ involvement with the southern border issues, there is evidence showing that as many as 85,000 unaccompanied minors were child labor trafficked from the southern border into the United States, largely with the facilitation of the Biden Administration.

Biden Has Dementia. What Does Kamala Harris Have?

Calling Kamala Harris to account for any of this would be a significant political win for Republicans, and for Donald Trump. It would also be the right thing to do.

Was Harris actually “border czar”? At the time, the media certainly talked about her as if she were. Axios even used the term in announcing her trip to Guatamala and Central America in April, 2021.

Vice President Harris said Wednesday she plans to visit Mexico and Guatemala "as soon as possible" in a diplomatic effort to address surging migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, Reuters reports.

Why it matters: The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has reached crisis levels. Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the "root causes" that drive migration.

Axios, unsurprisingly, has gotten considerable roasting online for denying their own reporting.

Update: Thanks to MRC Newsbusters, we have a video montage of most if not all of the major cable news outlets repeatedly calling Kamaa Harris Joe Biden’s “border czar”.

In addition to the explicit references to Kamala Harris as Biden’s “border czar”, the Associated Press headline announcing Kamala Harris’ role within the Biden Administration’s efforts to resolve the issues at the southern border certainly gave an impression of a broad portfolio.

The lead paragraph in that story indicated that Harris would be handling at least two different parts of the immigration issue and the Administration’s response.

President Joe Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border and work with Central American nations to address root causes of the problem.

Joe Biden’s comments further suggest Harris had broad and significant authority.

“When she speaks, she speaks for me,” Biden said, noting her past work as California’s attorney general makes her specially equipped to lead the administration’s response.

To be clear, a specific and significant part of Harris’ brief did include diplomatic efforts in Central and South America, but there was also a clear law-enforcement component indicated as well.

Harris is tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts to deal with issues spurring migration in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as pressing them to strengthen enforcement on their own borders, administration officials said. She’s also tasked with developing and implementing a long-term strategy that gets at the root causes of migration from those countries.

That was how the Associated Press reported her assignment at the time.

NBC News used a headline with a similarly sweeping declaration:

I shall let readers decide for themselves how broad Harris’ role was to have been given such media headlines.

The lead paragraphs from NBC News continued the expansive description:

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he has appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead efforts to stem migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, as the administration faces growing political pressure to address a surge in undocumented migrant children unaccompanied by parents.

Biden said during an immigration meeting at the White House that he had asked Harris to lead the administration's efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, countries that will "need help stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border."

NBC News also included commentary which indicated that Harris role would have significant involvement at the southern border and also would be coordinating with various departments and cabinet-level officers.

A senior administration official said Harris' role would focus on "two tracks": both curbing the current flow of migrants and implementing a long-term strategy that addresses the root causes of migration. Cabinet members, including the secretary of state, are expected to work closely with Harris on these issues.

We should also remember that, at the time, the incoming Biden Administration was grappling with significant resource and staffing problems at the border and at various detention facilities, creating its own crisis of overcrowding, something that Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar called on the Biden Administration to address at the time.

Cuellar told Axios that the conditions are "terrible" for the migrant children and, though agents were "doing the best they can under the circumstances," they are not equipped to care for children and need help from the Biden administration.

Officials with CBP and the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment but did not dispute the authenticity of the images.

As of Sunday morning, there were 4,878 unaccompanied children in Border Patrol custody, with 822 unaccompanied children in its custody over 10 days, well past the three-day legal limit.

This was the backdrop for Harris’ southern border assignment.

However, despite the media coverage of Biden’s original announcement, corporate media subsequently sought to downplay Harris’ role in resolving issues at the southern border.

Harris’ exact role hasn’t been fully laid out publicly. Though senior administration officials keep hammering home that Harris isn’t in charge of the administration’s overall immigration agenda or activity at the border, Symone Sanders, Harris’ senior advisor and chief spokesperson, told reporters Friday that the vice president received an “extensive briefing on the northern triangle and Latin America” and would be “speaking with leaders from the region in the near future.”

Does that mean Harris was not the “border czar”? Not necessarily. The use of the term “czar” within government is a utilitarian rather than formal title. As Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris would not have received any additional title nor would she have been named to any other office.

Moreover, the same Politico article went on to describe Harris as “highly engaged”.

Sergio Gonzales, a former senior policy adviser to Harris on immigration and homeland security, points to how Harris maneuvered in 2017, just weeks after President Donald Trump had rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, as an example of the type of tact she will bring to the issue. Between heavy policy focused meetings with staff and immigration advocates, then-Senator Harris gave her staff a mandate to set up drinks and snacks at her Hart senate office building for the DREAMERs, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children that were protected under DACA, that had come to Capitol Hill.

It was, in part, an effort to show her support for the young people at the heart of the policy tug-of-war.

“She's going to be highly engaged and be involved in the detail. And she's going to be thinking about this from a human-centered point of view,” said Gonzales.

The Politico article also noted Harris work both as California Attorney General and San Francisco district attorney on immigration issues:

As attorney general, Harris helped coordinate immigration lawyers for families in need of assistance, particularly children, traveled to the border multiple times to meet with local officials and created a task force targeting transnational gangs. At the time, Harris said: “Violent gangs don’t respect borders any more than they respect the law. My office is committed to doing whatever it takes to protect the citizens of California from gang violence and drug-running.”

She’s also received blowback from her time as the district attorney of San Francisco for supporting a policy to turn over underage undocumented immigrants to authorities if they were accused of having committed a felony. Her presidential campaign told CNN that that “policy was intended to protect the sanctuary status of San Francisco.” But they also acknowledged that the “policy could have been applied more fairly.”

There can be no doubt but that the media presumption at the time was that Harris was expected to contribute a measure of legislative and law enforcement expertise to the Biden Administration border policy initiatives—which again would be what a “border czar” would do.

Nor should we overlook Kamala Harris’ own comments regarding her role in border issues when interviewed by NBC’s Lester Holt.

Note the statements she makes:

• “Well, we are going to the border. We have to deal with what’s happening at the border. There’s no question about that. That’s not a debateable point."

• “There’s not going to be a quick fix. We’re not going to see an immediate return. But we are going to see progress. The real work is going to take time to manifest itself.”

This was the same interview where, when Holt pointed out that she had not made a visit to the southern border, Harris artlessly replied: “I haven’t been to Europe. I don’t understand the point you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.”

If her role had little to no involvement with what as actually being done at the southern border, this was a perfect moment to clarify that, and she did not do so. Instead, she gave the impression that she was indeed involved in things being done at the actual border.

Thus there were good reasons that Andrew R. Arthur, Resident Fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, described Harris as a “sort of” border czar in discussing the policy initiatives she was tasked with implementing in Central America:

Vice President Kamala Harris is apparently the new “border czar” — sort of. As Politico explains: “Harris’ exact role hasn’t been fully laid out publicly.” But she is ostensibly spearheading efforts to deal with what some experts describe as the “root causes of migration” — usually described as “poverty, high levels of violence, and corruption in Mexico” El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. I wish her the best, but she will likely be no more successful than her predecessors.

Still, we must also note that even before Biden officially became President, his transition team made it known he would be making Ambassador Roberta Jacobson, a career diplomat and former Ambassador to Mexico, “coordinator for the southwestern border”.

Roberta Jacobson, an American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2016 to 2018, will be named as coordinator for the southwestern border on the National Security Council, Foreign Policy has learned. In this newly-established NSC position, Jacobson will play a key role in implementing the Biden administration’s proposed reforms to the national asylum system and managing national security challenges stemming from Mexico and Central America.

Was Jacobson the actual border czar? As Andrew R. Arthur noted in a subsequent CIS blog post, her title was the sort that a “czar” would receive. Kamala Harris was seemingly one border czar, but not the only border czar.

The claim currently circulating within the media that Kamala Harris was never “border czar” is simply disingenuous (even ignoring Axios’ own use of the term), because the very nature of “czars” has always been deliberately ambiguous—“czar” is an informal description of a job, not the actual job title:

Of course, there is no formal “czar” (a term denoting the autocrat in certain Eastern European countries, most notably the Russian empire), but the executive branch has used the term loosely for almost 60 years to describe an official with a portfolio that includes the duties of other officials.

This became of particular concern during the Obama Administration, given Barack Obama’s penchant for utilizing policy “czars” on a wide array of issues. Obama’s use of czars was so prolific that Congress began to take issue with the practice.

In a city where power is carefully hoarded and monitored, Obama has drawn complaints from Congress about his use of the so-called czars, officials he has appointed to coordinate environmental, health and other policy areas among various departments.

Lawmakers in both parties have sent letters to the White House saying the czar appointments skirt Congress’ authority to confirm top executive branch officials and subject them to oversight hearings.

When Congress convened a panel of “experts” to weigh in on the matter, their conclusion was that “czars” were permissible so long as their authority remained carefully circumscribed.

Called together by Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), who had written to Obama asking for more information about the czars, the panel concluded that Obama had the right to appoint independent advisors. The experts said the principle had been established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“The president’s personal staff are independently responsible only to the president -- and in the end he is the only czar that is,” said Bradley H. Patterson, a presidential scholar. “And he is accountable to the American electorate.”

The distinction was made at the time that czars only possessed “practical authority” rather than legal authority, a distinction sufficient to sidestep the need for the Senate to confirm the appointments of czars to their office.

John Harrison, a University of Virginia law professor, compared the czars to the position of White House chief of staff, saying both hold great influence and can speak for the president, but their legal powers are limited.

Their “practical authority . . . is not legal authority, and as long as the distinction is rigorously maintained there will be no legal problem,” Harrison said in his written testimony.

Maintaining that distinction functionally limits a “czar” to a facilitation and coordination role (hence Ambassador Jacobson’s formal title on the NSC).

Yet facilitiation and coordination were expressly indicated as being part of Harris’ portfolio, according to the reporting at the time:

Cabinet members, including the secretary of state, are expected to work closely with Harris on these issues.

Nor did corporate media leave much doubt that Joe Biden was delegating substantial authority to Harris to work on border issues. Saying “When she speaks, she speaks for me,” as Biden is quoted as saying, is a very broad delegation of authority.

This is in addition to the inherent implied authority she has as the Vice President of the United States.

This is no small point, either. From the very beginning, Joe Biden has attached Kamala Harris’ name to the whole of his administration.

Joe Biden went out of his way to depict Kamala Harris almost as a “co-President” and not merely Vice President. She cannot claim credit for those things the public likes while disclaiming responsibility for those things the public dislikes. Given that Biden’s has been from the beginning the “Biden-Harris Administration” Kamala Harris necessarily owns all the policy failures along with the policy successes (assuming there are any).

Was Kamala Harris “officially” named “border czar”? No—because “officially” there is no such job title within the federal bureaucracy. However, as Vice President, Harris would never have received such a title. No matter what duties she took on, she would have always had the same title: Vice President of the United States.

Was Kamala Harris acting as a “border czar”? She was reported as having great influence, and was expected to speak for President Biden, just as any “czar” would have been. Joe Biden himself went out of his way to present Harris as having great authority and influence within the Admiistration as a whole.

As is apparent from Ambassador Jacobson’s role in border issues, Harris was not the only one in the Biden Administration with a rather expansive brief regarding the border, but the informality of the term “border czar” also means such roles are never exclusive. It is quite possible for the Biden Administration to have multiple “border czars” and, apparently, that is what happened.

Corporate media wants you to ignore all of this. Corporate media wants you to pretend none of this actually happened—even though it did.

Corporate media wants you to forget what corporate media told you back in 2021: that President Joe Biden effectively made Vice President Kamala Harris one of his border czars in every way that mattered.