Vice President Kamala Harris made her first pilgrimage to the border Friday, landing in El Paso, Texas, for a brief tour of a Border Patrol facility.
She was scheduled to meet later in the day with people who are running shelters that are assisting the illegal immigrants who cross the Mexican border, including performing COVID-19 testing and helping arrange transportation deeper into the U.S.
Her visit comes as the border situation is becoming more problematic. New reports of harsh conditions for immigrant children have sent officials rushing to the region. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra announced his own upcoming visit to Fort Bliss, which has been turned into an emergency shelter.
And beyond the children, the border numbers remain disconcertingly high for the new administration.
Ms. Harris, a former California senator, had visited the border before becoming vice president but had resisted making a trip in her current office, despite President Biden personally tapping her with helping solve the surge of illegal immigration.
For months, aides had insisted her purview was the international scene, negotiating with Central American countries and Mexico to try to curtail the flow of people leaving those countries. She made a trip to the region weeks ago to talk over how billions of dollars in U.S. assistance might be spent.
With Friday’s visit, Republicans say she now owns the border itself.
Most security experts — and Border Patrol agents, who encounter the illegal immigrants — say the Biden administration has misdiagnosed the current surge.
They say that factors pulling the migrants to the U.S. are causing the higher numbers. Among those factors are the return of the policy of “catch-and-release” for migrant families.
The Biden administration has acknowledged that’s true in some cases. It admits the record number of illegal immigrant children who have jumped the border this year are coming because of a more lenient policy toward them.
Administration officials have claimed success in the case of the children, saying turning them back at the border as the Trump team did was inhumane. And the new administration, which faced accusations of kids in cells at the peak of the child surge this spring, has managed to cut dramatically the number in Border Patrol custody.
But thousands of the children remain in custody of the federal Health and Human Services Department in makeshift shelters with frequent lice outbreaks, where gang activity has been reported and where underwear and socks are in such short supply that girls are refusing to shower because they have nothing to change into afterward.
Ms. Harris‘ visit comes just days before former President Trump makes his own pilgrimage to the border for the first time since leaving office.
His aides say his planned trip, with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, forced Ms. Harris‘ hand.
Chad Wolf, who served as acting secretary at the Department of Homeland Security for Mr. Trump, said Ms. Harris‘ visit was a welcome development, but also a missed opportunity.
She chose to go to El Paso in Texas’ far western tip. That’s hundreds of miles from the epicenter of the crisis in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas.
“Hopefully, Harris‘ trip will be a working visit, not just border security tourism,” Mr. Wolf said.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, traveling with Ms. Harris, defended the choice of El Paso, saying he had recommended it and it was an active sector of the border.
He said it “provides the vice president with an opportunity to see the full array” of border challenges.
