Ten weeks after Joe Biden named his second in command to lead effort to stem migration at border, Vice Pres. Kamala Harris finally boarded Air Force 2 Sunday to head to Central America to begin her meetings with Northern Triangle leaders.
The first indication that the trip was ill-fated came a half hour after takeoff when “technical issues” forced the plane to return to the D.C. area.
The second indication came when the plane arrived in Guatemala, the first of Harris’s stops, where she was immediately greeted by protesters holding signs that read “Kamala, Trump won” and “Kamala, go home”:
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Over the weekend, meanwhile, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei reacted to her imminent visit by blasting the Biden administration for “family reunification” policies that enable human trafficking and smuggling and blamed his administration for the border crisis. He added that the American president’s message is contributing to the 21-year high in border crossings:
So how did meetings go once Giammattei and Harris met? According to her, the two “had a robust, candid and thorough conversation” in which they “discussed that fundamentally, most people do not want to leave home, they don’t want to leave the place where the language they know is spoken.”
As a news conference with the Guatemalan leader afterward, Harris told the people of the nation, “Do not come.” That is a far cry from her stated agenda, which was to identity the root causes of migration from Central America to the U.S.
In anticipation of her visit to the Northern Triangle, the New York Times ran a column over the weekend with the curious title “U.S. aid to Central America hasn’t slowed migration. Can Kamala Harris?” The article noted that Biden as vice president had committed hundreds of millions of dollars to making the region more tolerable for its people so that fewer would abandon it, adding that now as president he has upped the ante considerably in the hopes that Harris can accomplish the task he failed at. Based on her “successes,” today, the prognosis is less than rosy.
