WH Press Secretary SCRUTINIZED on BORDER
Vice President Kamala Harris’ handling of the border situation came under scrutiny on Thursday from Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Doocy perused a card distributed to House Democrats, which had talking points regarding Harris and her involvement in managing the border situation. On March 24, 2021, President Joe Biden selected Harris to handle the flood of immigration from Mexico and the Northern Triangle nations.
“So, the first one says Vice President Harris was never appointed border czar. There has never been such a position, it doesn’t exist. Why are Democrats so sensitive about the vice president and the border?” Doocy asked.
“Why are Republicans so sensitive about actually not owning up to them getting in the way of a border deal? Why?” Jean-Pierre said. “Why won’t they own up to that? Why won’t they add up to the last president who told them not to move forward? It was a bipartisan deal, just right there, available to them, and they voted twice against it. Twice against it. Why are they so sensitive in actually moving forward and actually dealing on an issue that most Americans care about; what’s going on at the border.”
Jean-Pierre brought up the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, which called for border closures if the average daily number of unauthorized incursions for a week topped 5,000. On February 7, Senate Republicans obstructed the bill and House Republicans declared it would be “dead on arrival.”
According to Doocy, Harris neglected to address the underlying causes of migration, which made the issue a hot topic of discussion leading up to the 2024 election. Jean-Pierre refuted the claim that Biden designated Harris as the “border czar,” and he gave credit to the vice president and Biden for “taking action” to ease the situation at the border.
“So yes, we are going to debunk the false characterization of the vice president. She was not the border czar, and it’s not just us. Independent fact-checkers have said the same thing, that that did not exist and that that is not true,” Jean-Pierre replied.
Harris traveled to the border for the first time on June 25, 2021, ninety days after being appointed. Before she visited the border in El Paso, Texas, where she saw a Border Patrol station and a processing center, the vice president traveled to Guatemala and Mexico.
According to Customs and Immigration Enforcement, the number of illegal encounters at the border between the United States and Mexico topped a record 2.3 million in the fiscal year 2022 and above 2.4 million in the fiscal year 2023. Over 1.8 million encounters have been reported so far in the 2024 fiscal year.
On Thursday, six Democrats backed a resolution denouncing Harris for her “failure to secure the United States border,” joining House Republicans in doing so.
