Article by Jeff Crouere in Townhall
Calamity Kamala Is An International Laughingstock
Upon becoming president, Joe Biden created a disaster at the nation’s southern border. He foolishly ordered an immediate halt to the construction of our border wall. He also abandoned Trump administration policies that were clearly working. The result has been a massive increase in the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States.
This stampede of migrants has overwhelmed our resources at the border and created a true humanitarian catastrophe. To show he was taking action to deal with the problem, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to be his point person on the border crisis.
Even though he has selected crazed leftists for many of the positions in his administration, choosing Harris may have been his worst appointment. Harris is a total embarrassment who has never succeeded in any position throughout her political career.
As a presidential candidate, Harris departed the race early after a series of pathetic performances in debates. Her fundraising collapsed and she exited several months before the first presidential caucus.
Biden rescued her from political obscurity when he chose her as his running mate. As the vice-presidential candidate, she failed to capture the imagination of voters and was fairly ineffective. In her only televised debate with her Republican opponent, Vice President Mike Pence, she was terrible and lost convincingly.
Her performance as vice president has been even worse, so it is mystifying why Biden would choose her for such an important role as dealing with the border crisis. In this position, she has been even worse than expected, acting in an arrogant, ill-informed manner that has only exacerbated the crisis.
For months, Harris has been dodging questions about whether she would visit the border. Eventually, the Biden administration morphed her mission into an investigation of the “root causes” of the border catastrophe. To further her investigation, she visited Guatemala and Mexico last week. To say it was an unmitigated disaster is an understatement. It was possibly the worst foreign trip for any United States vice president in modern history.
Her performance was so poor that even pro-Biden news outlets like CNN were reporting the White House was disappointed in the trip and “perplexed” by her statements. In an interview with NBC news anchor Lester Holt, Harris seemed unprepared when he asked her about when she was going to visit the border. Her excuse was that she had not visited “Europe” either.
This answer was so poor that Meghan McCain of ABC’s The View commented that Harris “sounded like a moron” in the interview. McCain also noted that Harris seems to laugh whenever asked about the question. She remarked that her “nervous laugh is making me nervous that she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
Sadly, she does not know what she is doing on any issue. Her incompetence was on display during her recent trip where she clearly did not make any friends.
In Guatemala, the vice president was greeted by angry local residents who were upset that the Biden administration policies had worsened the problems in their country. Their signs read “Trump Won,” “Go Home” and “Kamala, Mind Your Own Business.”
The meeting with the President of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, was not much better. He noted his disagreements with the Biden administration on the border crisis. In a CBS interview that aired right before the Vice President arrived, Giammattei criticized the Biden administration. He said, “We asked the United States government to send more of a clear message to prevent more people from leaving.” He also observed that he was “not on the same side of the coin” as the vice president on the issue of migration.
In her press conference with the Guatemalan leader, Harris stated that migrants should not come to the United States for asylum because they will be returned to their home country. She claimed that “The president and I 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.”
Despite the challenges of travelling thousands of miles in dangerous conditions, the migrants continue to come to the United States because the Biden-Harris administration has created an open border. Along with stopping construction of the border wall, the new administration ended President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers. In addition, immigration court cases are being “fast tracked” for families that recently crossed into the country from Mexico.
Illegal immigrants have viewed the Biden administration policies as a clear sign to enter the United States. The results are both catastrophic and predictable. According to United States Customs and Border Protection, over 178,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the border in April 2021. The influx is not stopping as the problem continues to explode.
As the person charged by the president to deal with this crisis, Harris has refused to visit the border and examine the problem personally. Even though she now claims that she will make the trek to the border at some point, the delay has been totally unacceptable. According to United States Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), “I hope she does visit the southern border very, very soon. It is imperative. The longer she waits, the harder it is for her to explain why she hasn’t gone to view the crisis herself and form her own opinions about what’s going on.”
For Vice President Harris, there will be no escape from the border question until she visits. She was even questioned about it during participation at an LGBTQ pride parade on Saturday.
Not only is her refusal to visit the border a major problem, but her lack of consistency is not helping matters. After telling migrants to stay home during her visit to Guatemala, she changed her tune in an interview on Friday with the Spanish news wire service EFE. She claimed that she was committed to providing a “safe haven for those seeking asylum.”
Vice President Kamala Harris is the epitome of both inconsistency and incompetence.
