Vice President Kamala Harris will finally be visiting a city along the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday after avoiding the area like the plague due to the massive influx of illegal border crossings since Joe Biden became president.
What is notable about Harris's trip is where she decided to go: El Paso. It's not hard to figure out why she decided to go to one of the largest U.S. border towns out of the many places she could have gone. While El Paso has seen its fair share of the Biden border crisis, it far from one of the worst areas in Texas.
The areas between Del Rio and the Rio Grande Valley are where Harris should have gone in order to get a full grasp of what the Biden administration has caused. But by going to El Paso, she is inadvertently acknowledging that former President Donald Trump's approach to the border is the right approach.
One of the reasons why El Paso has been insulated from the large groups that cross over in places like La Joya, McAllen, and Hidalgo is because the El Paso Sector's border wall is mostly complete compared to the Rio Grande Valley Sector. In October, right before the 2020 election, then-Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan showed me the progress they were making in the El Paso Sector on building the wall system.
When I visited the area again in early February, I drove along the same road and saw just how many more miles of the wall system the contractors were able to build before Biden told them to stop in January. Now to be clear, there are gaps and places where the wall is not complete, but it is a night and day difference compared to the Rio Grande Valley Sector, where gaps are more common than completed sections.
So not only is Harris going to a "politically safer" part of the border, but she is going to a relatively "safer" portion of the border thanks, in part, to Trump's wall. Because of that wall, illegal immigrants have to cross in fewer numbers compared to the large groups who cross over in areas without a wall, but they also try to get in via trains that come from Mexico.
It's good Harris will finally be close to the border, but nothing will likely change because the administration does not care about the effects of its open border rhetoric and policies.