If Kamala Harris isn’t ruing the day she accepted the assignment as “border czar,” she is getting close. Each day, it seems, some reporter — whether it be NBC’s Lester Holt or Univision’s Ilia Calderón — asks her when she is going to the border. And each day Harris has to explain all over again that she will be visiting the border after she completes a magical vision quest to learn the “root causes of migration,” as though those causes were so difficult to know.
That repeating this two-step is becoming burdensome for Harris is evident from her exchange with Calderón in which she becomes visibly annoyed — a lapse she quickly attempts to conceal by emitting one of her patented cackles.
Kamala Harris: I’ve said I’m going to go to the border.
Reporter: When are you going to the border, Vice President?
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Harris: — administration has asked — I’m not finished! I’ve said I’m going to the border. And also, if we are going to deal with the problems at the border, we have to deal with the problems that caused people to go to the border, to flee to the border, and that is the root causes. So my first trip as Vice President of the United States was to go, in terms of a foreign trip, to Guatemala, to be on the ground there to address and to be informed of the root causes, why are the people of Guatemala leaving.
Reporter: Do you have a date — [in Spanish]?
Harris: I will keep you posted.
In the meantime, despite the administration’s denial and repeated insistences that the border is “closed,” both the smugglers and the migrants themselves are getting more brazen, crossing shallow sections of the Rio Grande in broad daylight and plain view of border agents on the American side. By the administration’s own calculus, Southwest border crossings are on pace for their highest levels in 20 years.
