Harris Can’t Escape the Human Toll of Her Dismal Border Record

COMMENTARY Border Security

Harris Can’t Escape the Human Toll of Her Dismal Border Record

Aug 19, 2024 3 min read
COMMENTARY BY
Kevin D. Roberts, PhD

President

Heritage Trustee since 2023
Vice President Kamala Harris participates in a roundtable discussion on June 25, 2021 in El Paso, Texas.  PATRICK T. FALLON / Contributor / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

Kamala Harris is peddling lies as she insists, in a slick new campaign ad and at rallies, that she’ll be “tough” on the border crisis.

More than 10 million inadmissible aliens, along with at least 2 million more known “gotaways,” have entered since she and Biden took office.

Four more years of her pro-crime policies will only make things worse.

Kamala Harris is peddling lies as she insists, in a slick new campaign ad and at rallies, that she’ll be “tough” on the border crisis.

“Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris,” a narrator intones in her Aug. 7 ad.

She’s directly challenged former President Donald Trump on border security.

“I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week,” she said at an Atlanta rally.

“Including, for example, on the issue of immigration.”

So why hasn’t anyone in the media asked the vice president about her record?

Because Kamala Harris is responsible for our current border crisis. 

Two weeks into President Biden’s term, he handed off a major task to his VP: “Leading the Administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”

News outlets at the time rightly deemed her the “border czar” responsible for—as Biden explained—“stemming the migration to our southern border.” 

On Harris’ watch, illegal immigration has increased exponentially: More than 10 million inadmissible aliens, along with at least 2 million more known “gotaways,” have entered since she and Biden took office.

Compare that to the roughly 2 million illegal border crossings that occurred over the entire course of the Trump presidency.

The numbers don’t lie—but they also don’t tell the full story of how the Biden-Harris crisis is destroying communities across the country, making Americans less financially secure and less safe.

For example, these stats don’t show the challenges that Texas and Arizona public school teachers will face this fall as they try to incorporate thousands of unaccompanied minors into their classrooms.

Setting aside the millions of taxpayer dollars that already cash-strapped public-school systems must dedicate to these new students—and the fact that Harris’ opposition to school choice would mean that students could be forced to attend these schools—the pure human cost is horrifying.

With Kamala in charge of the border, the United States has encountered an unfathomable 515,000 unaccompanied minors.

These poor children speak no English and have almost no support system here.

By Biden’s own estimation, 75 to 80% of them are suffering from the trauma of being brought into the United States by smugglers who “routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse.” 

The stats also don’t tell the story of Springfield, Ohio, a small Midwestern town of roughly 60,000 residents.

Thanks to the Harris-Biden border crisis, nearly 20,000 Haitians have resettled in Springfield, causing an alarming uptick in violence and a full-blown housing crisis.

Things are so bad that last month city manager Bryan Heck sent a letter to the U.S. Senate begging for federal support.

“Bidenomics” has already raised the sale price for a single-family home in the United States to 5.6 times higher than the median household income—a sharp increase from just 4.1 times higher in 2019. Americans’ median mortgage payment is now twice as high as it was in 2021.

Should Harris win the White House, we’ll see four more years of these same economic policies, along with millions more illegal immigrants—and Springfield’s housing crisis will become a nationwide catastrophe.

Finally, these stats can never account for the Americans who have lost their lives as a direct result of Kamala’s border failures.

Since Biden and Harris took office, fentanyl-related deaths have more than doubled.

Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 49.

In a little over six months—between October 2022 and April 2023—Customs and Border Protection seized more than 17,000 pounds of fentanyl at the southern border, enough to kill every single American 14 times over.

And we must remember the names of some of the Americans who have been murdered at the hands of illegal aliens who should have never been let into this country: Rachel Morin of Maryland, raped and murdered by an illegal alien from El Salvador last year; Laken Riley of Georgia, murdered in February by an illegal alien from Venezuela; Jocelyn Nungaray, a Texas 12-year-old raped and strangled by two illegal Venezuelan migrants in June.

All their blood is on the vice president’s hands.

Four more years of her pro-crime policies will only make things worse.

The Democrats will try to distance their new nominee from her record on the border.

They will downplay her responsibility.

They will lie and say that she actually did a great job.

And they will desperately try to distract the American people from their radicalism.

But it won’t work.

Kamala Harris’s record speaks for itself.

Americans know that.

And they know four more years of her destructive agenda will only exacerbate the current crisis.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post