Kamala Harris ‘One of the Most Catastrophic Failures in American History’: Congressman

Efforts by Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to back away from her role in America’s open border crisis have failed, as congressional inquiries have demanded she produce documents showing “what, if any” steps she took to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, drugs, and cartels into the U.S. heartland.

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee launched an investigation Tuesday into “Vice President Harris’s role in effectuating the worst border crisis in American history.” A letter to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner Troy Miller calls for all documents and communications between U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Executive Office of the Vice President related to the southwest border or illegal immigration from the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration. DHS has until August 20 to comply. In a separate inquiry, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has requested that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas turn over all communications between March 2021 and March 2022 referring to Kamala Harrs with the term a “czar” or “lead” overseeing “border,” “migration,” or “immigration” by August 30.

Harris’s three-year tenure as border czar will go down as “one of the most catastrophic failures in American history,” said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “Kimberly Cheadle, director of Service, recognized her failures and resigned” after last month’s attempted assassination of President Donald Trump.

President Joe Biden turned responsibility for stemming the unprecedented flow of illegal immigrants into the United States over to Harris in a public event in March 2021, yet Republicans say she did little to nothing to honor that charge. “Give us the homework. Show us your work. Show us what meetings you had, what research you did. What fact-finding missions did you engage in?” Burlison told guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice, who now serves as Family Research Council Action president. 

“I don’t know that we’re going to find that she did a whole lot,” said Burlison.

All three years of the Biden administration have broken previous records for illegal immigration in 1986 (1,692,544) and its close second in 2001 (1,676,438), when politicians also promised mass amnesty for illegal aliens:

• Fiscal Year 2021 saw an historic 1,734,686 illegal entries at the southern border (not including other means of entry).
• FY 2022 (2,378,944)
• FY 2023 (2,475,669)

Reasonable estimates place the total number of illegal entries under the Biden-Harris administration at 10 million.

Each entry has had massive consequences for U.S. citizens. “The mass illegal migration under the Biden-Harris [a]dministration has contributed to murders, sexual assaults, and serious bodily injuries committed against numerous Americans at the hands of illegal aliens,” noted the Oversight Committee.

Republicans say promises of free government benefits and a path to U.S. citizenship have acted as a magnet for illegal immigration. “When you create handouts and other benefits for people who are able to get into the United States, you're only driving up the demand. I think that it’s pretty obvious the root cause,” Burlison said.

Kamala Harris has a long history of ardent opposition to border security and promising benefits to illegal immigrants:

• At a June 2018 campaign stop on the Mexican border at San Diego, Harris charged that President Trump’s border security policy constituted a “crime against humanity.”
• In a November 2018 congressional hearing, she asked President Trump’s nominee to lead ICE, Ron Vitiello, “Do you see any parallels” between ICE and a “domestic terrorist organization” such as the Ku Klux Klan. (“I see no perception that puts ICE in the same category as the KKK,” replied Vitello.)
• In 2018, “Meet the Press” asked candidate Kamala Harris whether she agreed with her campaign supporters who held signs to “Abolish ICE,” referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). When asked if she agreed, Harris replied. “We’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role. … We need to think about probably think about starting from scratch.”
• In her 2020 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris offered an amnesty “Plan To Forge A Roadmap To Citizenship By Executive Action,” saying anyone who disagrees with her policy to exempt “over 6 million immigrants from deportation” is “failing an important moral test.”
• Harris raised her hand when Savannah Guthrie asked presidential hopefuls at a June 2019 Democratic debate, “Raise your hand if your government plan would provide [health care] coverage for undocumented immigrants.”
• When asked during a 2019 Democratic debate whether authorities should deport an illegal immigrant before he commits an additional crime against U.S. citizens, Harris responded, “No, they should not be deported.”
• During a 2019 interview with National Public Radio, Harris threatened not to enforce border enforcement laws and seemingly hinted she might allow all illegal border-crossers to apply for asylum status. “I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge,” she said.

Despite — or because of — that record, Biden put Vice President Harris in charge of “stemming the migration to our southern border” and called her “the most qualified person to do it” on March 24, 2021. Friendly media outlets promptly dubbed her the “Border Czar.” Harris’s aides began to “panic” after the announcement, according to a White House official familiar with the situation, and immediately began to assert the vice president oversaw only the “root causes” of “irregular migration” from just three countries in the so-called Norther Triangle: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

“Assuming that she was responsible only for root causes, how fruitful have her efforts been in that regard? Not very, and the statistics prove it,” wrote Andrew Arthur at the Center for Immigration Studies. “[H]er efforts have been fruitless.” Her so-called “Root Causes Strategy” involved showering those governments with $4 billion in foreign aid over four years.

Under Kamala Harris’s leadership, the administration has “more than doubled — if not tripled — the amount of people that have come across the border that under the Trump administration,” Burlison noted.

In June, Harris called for “a meaningful path to citizenship” for some portion of America’s estimated 16 to 29 million illegal immigrant population.

“Vice President Harris’s root causes approach to solving the border crisis has been an abject failure as encounters at the southwest border remain high,” stated the Oversight Committee letter. “As the administration would freely admit, most root causes (poverty, corruption, violence, etc.) in those countries were long-standing and endemic, which raises the question of why apprehensions have risen since, if simply addressing root causes was the answer.”

Increasingly, those entering the country have shown up on the terror watchlist, with dozens subsequently being released into the United States.

“DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas keeps telling us that we don't have an open border, that everyone is vetted,” immigration scholar Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at CIS, told Hice on “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “This report makes very clear that there is a lot that we should be very concerned about.”