Where’s Waldo is a fun book series for children, which makes a game of trying to find Waldo and his striped hat amid huge crowds of people and objects.
“Where’s Kamala” is a less fun game for grownups, wondering where our Vice President and her awkward laugh went as unprecedented numbers of illegal aliens stream across the border she was in charge of fixing.
Philip Wegmann reported today for RealClearPolitics that “Harris has not hosted an immigration-specific event since last summer.”
Even that event was only tangentially related to the southern border crisis. Wegmann described it as “a meeting with Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander leaders in the White House last August” that “touched briefly on immigration.”
The White House insists that “the vice president continues to lead implementation of the Root Causes Strategy and has been engaging with Cabinet and other Administration officials on this effort.”
If so, Harris is engaging in a very private effort — one might even call it “hidden” — regarding one of Presidentish Joe Biden’s most public crises.
Well, can you blame her?
The situation our “border czar” was supposed to fix has gotten so bad under the Biden-Harris Administration (or is that Harris-Biden?) that it could be the setup to a not-funny Johnny Carson bit.
Johnny: I read in the paper that the southern border has gotten so bad…
Audience: HOW BAD IS IT?
Johnny: It’s so bad that even when there are TV cameras down there, Kamala Harris won’t show up.
See? I told you it wasn’t funny.
But it’s true that the border has gotten so out-of-control that even the publicity-hungry Veep is shying away from it.
While he’s been temporarily stymied by the courts, Biden is still pushing to repeal Title 42, a health-related measure that’s believed to have stopped as many as a million illegal aliens from crossing the border. The expected surge if (when?) Title 42 is repealed has Border Patrol preparing for the worst:
[Border Patrol Chief Raul] Ortiz recognized that Border Patrol faces a “current migrant surge and is preparing for the anticipated increase in encounters of undocumented noncitizens following the anticipated lifting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s [CDC] Title 42 public health order.”
Ortiz outlines several parameters for releasing migrants when Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Removal Operations (ICE ERO) lacks capacity.
“The guidance is for situations where US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Removal Operations are unable to accept custody of non citizens due to lack of bed space, such that non citizens must be released directly from USBP custody to avoid overcrowding and excessive time in custody,” Ortiz wrote.
Despite the record surge of illegals — who somehow didn’t quite believe Biden or Harris when they told them to stay home — deportations are down 80% since 2019.
Gosh, do you think that might have something to do with the surge?
It’s long been my theory that the White House assigned Harris to the border crisis in order to kneecap her ambitions:
I’d pondered previously on this page if White House distrust of Harris was the reason she’d been assigned to “fix” the border crisis because it was a crap assignment on multiple levels.
The first level is that with Democrats in charge, there is no fixing the border crisis.
The second level is that, politically, the border was a lose-lose proposition for Harris. If she made progress, that would annoy her “woke” and “progressive” base. If she failed, she would make no friends with the moderates she might need in the future to further her presidential ambitions.
The third level is that the White House doesn’t actually want to solve the border crisis, they want to make it worse. So why not make the unloved, untrusted Harris the face of failure?
The Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden Administration knew exactly what their policies would do to our southern border: Effectively erase it.
It’s been such a resounding success that not even Harris wants to be associated with it any longer.
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