'Border czar' or not, Kamala Harris ran from her job to get the border under control

It’s not easy to discern what Kamala Harris accomplished in her tenure as vice president.

The Onion once described this conundrum with the headline, “White House urges Kamala Harris to sit at computer all day in case emails come through.”

Even Harris’s own people complained to CNN in 2021 that the West Wing — Joe Biden and staff — had turned her into a potted palm.

Now that Harris has risen to the top of the Democrats’ presidential ticket, her defenders in the party and back-fillers in the media have undertaken a less complicated task.

They’re telling us what Harris didn’t do.

She didn’t oversee the border.

Harris was never the 'border czar,' media claims

To put it more bluntly, they claim that she didn’t oversee the disaster that is the Biden-Harris border policy. She was never the “border czar.”

Sure. Whatever you say.

In his day, Arizona Sen. John McCain used to say the Democrats “have more czars than the Romanovs.”

Democratic lawmakers are striding to the podium to hammer back any notion that Harris was ever the “border czar.” Republicans concocted the whole thing, they fume.

National media joined that chorus with their obedient little fact checks, until their knickers got caught in the ring washer.

Axios, for instance, promoted its own piece this way: “The Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had.”

Then readers pointed out that Axios, itself, had called Harris the “border czar” and also ran a headline in 2021 that read, “Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.”

News sites often make excuses for Kamala Harris

This caused all sorts of scrambling at Axios on Wednesday as it updated one story to say it had “incorrectly” called Harris the border czar, Fox News reported.

Soon after, one astute web commentator exclaimed, “Holy s---! Axios is literally throwing itself under the bus to rewrite history for Kamala.”

But Axios wasn’t alone.

Stories at The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek and others said Harris was focused on the root causes of illegal immigration in the so-called Northern Triangle — the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras where multitudes of people are fleeing violence and poverty for the United States.

Harris doesn't the scare the GOP: But Mark Kelly should

Hers was a diplomatic mission in central America, not a focus on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The unspoken subtext here is that Harris cannot be held responsible for the record high illegal immigration that happened under the Biden White House.

To visualize the border crisis that Biden & Co. created, you can go to the pages of The New York Times to see bar graphs that rise like skyscrapers after the Trump administration, depicting record border apprehensions in the Biden years of 2022 and 2023.

Check the record: This clearly was the VP's job

Understandably, that is now a key line of attack for Republicans.

So, what do Democrats do?

They deny Harris is culpable. They deny she was the “border czar.”

The problem is that one of their own, former Vice President Al Gore, invented this thing called the internet (so I’m told), that has dutifully kept a record of what actually went down in 2021 when Joe Biden handed the border portfolio to Kamala Harris.

Here’s how NBC News reported that moment on March 24, 2021:

Headline:

“Biden tasks Harris with 'stemming the migration' on southern border: The vice president is expected to focus on both curbing the current flow of migrants and coordinating with countries in the region to address the root causes of migration.”

NBC ran that headline because a “senior administration official” told them, “Harris’ role would focus on ‘two tracks’: both curbing the current flow of migrants and implementing a long-term strategy that addresses the root causes of migration.”

This presents yet another problem for today’s Democrats and the Harris campaign.

Harris didn't want the assignment and quit

If they keep going down this trail of “Kamala Harris was never the border czar,” they’re not going to like where it ends.

Pretty soon Republicans will direct voters back to CNN’s potted palm story and to what Biden’s team actually thought of Harris.

“Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.”

One of those multiplying concerns was the southern border. And Biden needed help.

But as CNN reported, Harris fled the assignment.

“Harris herself has said she didn’t want to be assigned to manage the border, aware that it was a no-win political situation that would only sandbag her in the future.”

Americans might read that and logically think, why would we expect a President Kamala Harris to solve a serious national problem at the border when it so obviously grips her with fear?

From there, this discussion leads to the disastrous Lester Holt interview, in which the NBC anchor pressed Harris on why, she herself, had never been to the border.

Her answer?

“And I haven’t been to Europe.”

Expect Trump to put her words on repeat

You could hear jaws drop all across America. You could also hear them hit the table at the White House. As CNN recounted, the West Wing was “annoyed.”

Which brings us back to today and the 2024 race for president.

It won’t be long now before the Trump rallies start putting the Lester Holt-Kamala Harris interview on a loop to the rhythms of Three Dog Night:

“Well, I never been to heaven

But I been to Oklahoma

Oh, they tell me I was born there

But I really don’t remember 

In Oklahoma, not Arizona

What does it matter?

What does it matter?” 

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kamala Harris owns the mess at the border, even if Democrats deny it