Harris’ Tough Talk vs. The Border Crisis Reality

Over the weekend, Kamala Harris made a trip down to the US-Mexico border, in what the National Border Patrol Council union described to be a 20-minute “photo op.” Now purporting to be tough on illegal migration, Harris’ record on the border cuts in contrast to her newfound tone.

During her tenure as vice president, the southern border has seen a historic spike of over 10 million illegal crossings, with 1.7 million gotaways — far surpassing the 415,000 reported during the Trump administration.

Additionally, new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed that there are currently over 425,000 non-detained illegal migrants with criminal convictions in the United States, with around half of those facing pending criminal charges.

Of the migrants facing criminal charges, over 13,000 have been convicted of homicide, nearly 16,000 for sexual assault, and 62,000 for assault. Nearly 2,000 have pending homicide charges, alongside thousands more facing charges for assault, burglary, and other serious offenses.

This data presented by ICE does not just reflect migrants who have entered the US under Biden-Harris, but those who have entered the country going back multiple administrations.

Former President Donald Trump jumped on the opportunity to criticize the Biden-Harris administration, sending out several posts about these new revelations.

As vice president, Harris oversaw the reversal of key Trump-era policies, such as the Remain in Mexico program and Title 42, a choice that conservatives argue contributed to the mass influx of illegal migrants. However, she recently lambasted the former president and his Republican allies in Congress for causing the failures at the border.

Harris blames the border crisis on Congressional Republicans shooting down a border bill earlier this year. “Donald Trump tanked it,” said Harris during a rally in the border town of Douglas, Arizona. “He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, ‘Stop the bill.’”

She suggested that she would, if elected president, slightly lower the daily crossing threshold, but stressed the importance of Congress passing a bill — despite the fact that the sitting president has the authority to take strong unilateral action on the issue.

What the media gets wrong

Kamala Harris receives very little pushback from the mainstream media on her handling of the illegal migration crisis. In fact, they tend to parrot the same point about Congressional Republicans’ supposed hypocrisy for refusing to support her border bill.

House Republicans voted against the Senate immigration bill earlier this year because they believed it failed to secure the border, incentivized more migration, and kept in place President Biden’s "catch and release" policy.

The media fact-checked Donald Trump for “distorting” the newly released ICE numbers, claiming he gave the impression that all the illegal migrants had arrived in just the past few years. However, they made no effort to hold Harris to account for the crisis of illegal migration into the US, and the unprecedented spike that occurred under her watch.

President Biden could, if he wanted to, reinstall Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy that prevented migrants from coming directly to America’s border. In spite of this, the media takes the Democrats’ side by blaming Congressional Republicans.

The media also tends to gaslight Republicans, asserting that Kamala Harris was never officially the “border czar” when, in fact, President Biden tasked her in 2021 with “stemming the migration” to the US-Mexico border.

Whether she actually held the title “border czar” is irrelevant — and a way for the media to deflect from the fact that she has accomplished little in her role.

Trump was again fact-checked on rates of illegal migration, as he asserts it skyrocketed once he left office. They note that illegal crossings began to increase in the last eight months of Trump’s term, not immediately after Biden took over.

Nowhere does the media’s fact-check acknowledge the much greater surge of illegal migrants during the Biden-Harris administration, nor does the media acknowledge the troubling crime accompanied by the spike in migration, nor how migration — both legal and illegal — has been affecting small-town America.