Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that the Biden administration has “made progress” in trying to gain control of the southern border, even as it tries to pave a more lenient path for migrants rushing to the U.S. in hopes of gaining a foothold.
Making her first border trip as vice president, she toured a Border Patrol office in El Paso, Texas, and then made a snap trip to the Paso del Norte border crossing, where she saw migrants who hoped to make asylum claims.
She delivered an upbeat assessment of the Biden team’s approach to what has been a record border surge, with illegal immigrant children coming in at unprecedented levels and other illegal immigrants tallying rates not seen in more than two decades.
Ms. Harris said the new administration has worked to try to erase Trump policies that she said had left the immigration system broken.
“In five months we’ve made progress, but there’s still much more work to be done, but we’ve made progress,” she told immigrant-rights advocates in a roundtable.
She also gave an attaboy to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was shepherding her on the trip.
“Mr. Secretary, you’re doing a great job,” she said.
Ms. Harris said she views the border surge as the result of what’s happening in Latin America, and said she approaches the issue from the standpoint of trying to solve the “root causes” in the countries that many of the migrants are leaving.
“Most people do not want to leave home. They do not want to leave the place they were raised, the language they know, the culture they know, the church where they go,” she said.
She said that view was reinforced by what she heard Friday.
“The work we have to do is addressing the cause, the root causes. Otherwise we’re going to continue to see the effect — what’s happening at the border,” she said.
Her evaluation of the reasons for the border surge is by no means a consensus conclusion.
A Department of Homeland Security-funded report released this month concluded that most migrants are coming because they can make far more money in the U.S. than they can in their home countries.
Surveys of people in the key Central American countries also show a big interest in leaving home to come to the U.S.
Border Patrol agents have questioned the Biden administration’s sense for what’s going on. They say the current surge is a response to more lenient policies from the Biden team, which have given migrants a sense that they have a better chance of being allowed to stay under the new regime.
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