It’s been 93 days since Kamala Harris was tapped for the role of “border czar,” and she’s finally making the trip.
Following heaps of backlash from both sides of the aisle, Harris departed Joint Base Andrews Friday morning for El Paso, Texas, where she will participate in a walking tour of the El Paso Central Processing Center.
Following the tour, Harris is expected to receive an “operational briefing” which will review the facility’s operations, technological advancements and efforts to combat transnational crime, Fox News reports.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and team-left Rep. Veronica Escobar joined Harris on her journey to the truth.
After the tour, Harris is set to make remarks to the press and will likely - hopefully - take questions.
Acting Director of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement Tom Homan blasted Harris for her calculatedly avoiding the worst-hit areas of the southern border, choosing El Paso over the Rio Grande Valley.
“Instead of going there and talking to the men and women dealing with that crisis and taking care of thousands of unaccompanied children, she picks El Paso because she doesn’t want to see the devastation that her administration’s policies have caused.”
Administration officials said that Harris’ trip is “building on” her “diplomatic work with Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.”
“As Vice President Harris said during her trip to Guatemala and Mexico: What happens at the border matters and is directly connected to what is happening in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras,” Harris’ chief spokeswoman and senior advisor Symone Sanders said Thursday. “It is directly connected to the work of addressing the root causes of migration.”
Officials also said the trip will “shed a spotlight” on the Biden administration’s work to “build a fair, humane and orderly immigration system.”
But perhaps it’s just too little too late.
Ironically enough, President Trump is set to visit the border with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott next week.
“Biden and Harris have handed control of our border over to cartels, criminals, and coyotes. Drug dealers, MS-13 gang members, human smugglers, sex traffickers, and the criminal elements of the world now have free reign,” Trump said in a statement. “What Biden and Harris have done, and are continuing to do on our border, is a grave and willful dereliction of duty.”
But, Sanders claimed that republican pressures had no influence on Harris’ decision to visit the border.
“This administration does not take their cues from republican criticism, nor from the former President of the United States of America. We have said, over a number of different occasions - and the vice president has said, over the course - over the last three months, that she would go to the border. She has been before. She would go again. She would go when it was appropriate; when it made sense.”
