Vice President Kamala Harris is in the ultimate no-win position when it comes to visiting the U.S./Mexico border. If she doesn’t go, she is shirking her responsibility, if she does, she will be politically damaged by the trip for a lifetime.
Imagine the photo-op that would stick with Harris for as long as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter would allow it. She would either be in front of the wall that Donald Trump built, an overflowing child detention facility posing with children in cages, or an opening in the wall that isn’t completed and serves as a passageway for illegal human trafficking.
Getting jeered by Guatemalans is a better look than that.
The press conference would be extra special as she inappropriately cackled at questions like, what do you plan on doing to help these children? Her futile and pathetic attempts to blame Donald Trump would be media fodder as Democrats who aspire to the presidency in 2024, see her as their likely opponent and her media shield would be shredded.
After seeing her performance with Lester Holt of NBC News is there any wonder why her team desperately doesn’t want her to go to the border? There is no such thing as a solemn cackle.
Harris’s bizarre, “I haven’t been to Europe either” response to Holt’s question on why she hadn’t been to the border was so bad that unnamed White House staff leaked that the White House was “perplexed and worried” by her remarks and overall failure on the trip.
Hardly the type of supportive response the putative president in waiting would expect from the “loyal” White House staff. It is so bad that she should probably put in a call to the equally likable Meghan Markle to get advice on dealing with palace intrigue and do the opposite.
However, America did learn a lot about the border crisis from the vice president’s trip.
We learned that the Guatemalan government blames the Biden administration for their citizens leaving for the border in droves and the instability it creates. We learned that some of the people of Guatemala, have a wicked sense of humor as they greeted her with signs declaring that “Trump won.” And we learned that the Mexican government doesn’t like her much better than the Guatemalan government does.
I guess she can blame former President Trump for this animus as he spoiled her chances by creating adult relationships with our southern neighbors through policies that actively discouraged their citizens from leaving their homes in the hopes of benefitting from the U.S. catch and release system.
But the real problem with Harris’s trip is her apparent unwillingness to actively discuss what the U.S. government can control – how we police the border and discourage illegal entrants – because that would lead to a recognition that President Trump’s solutions worked if the goal was to actually slow the human trafficking carnage.
And human trafficking carnage it is. The horrific tragedy at the southern border is a crisis that needs to be fixed, and it is much more than kids in Biden cages. The poor who are enticed by President Biden’s words during the campaign and his actions once he took office, face horrific cruelty on their journey north and even once they get into America.
The vice president doesn’t even have to go down to the border to find out the truth. She can stay in Washington, D.C. and get a briefing from former acting Director of ICE, Tom Homan, if she is really interested.
Homan would tell her the agonizing stories of 2-year-old children abandoned in the desert, in order to force the deployment of Border Patrol officers to save them, all so others with less pure motives can be smuggled in through the protective gaps.
She can learn about the rapes of the children and adults who travel northward in each way station and the fact that their parents often will put their little girls on birth control before leaving home in preparation for the inevitable sexual assaults along the way.
Homan will tell her about the people who have been found dead after being abandoned in the desert without water. And he can tell her about the cartels that control the human trafficking and why the Trump policies Harris decried as inhumane which effectively staunched the flow of innocents to the border were actually the most humane policies of all.
And yes, he will tell her about the criminal activity that is being allowed to go unpunished by her administration’s handcuffing of ICE agents in their attempts to arrest and deport illegal aliens who are violent criminals.
No one is naïve enough to think that Vice President Harris is going to do an about face from her own policies after learning the ugly truth of the illegal immigration onslaught unleashed due to the actions of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, the human trafficking lobby is too strong in the Democratic Party.
The inhumanity of the Biden/Harris border policy is beyond clear, but rather than rebranding the Trump policies that worked, it is likely that Vice President Harris will pass the buck to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, saying the border is his problem, she’s dealing with foreign governments, and declare her work done.
And that would be the most Washington, D.C. thing ever, limit the personal political damage with no regard for those whose lives are being destroyed on both sides of the border.
Richard Manning is President of Americans for Limited Government.