Kamala Harris spent the last three years leading America’s response to the border crisis but refuses to discuss it. Honestly, who can blame her? Under her watch as America’s chief envoy to combat the root causes of migration, border numbers hit record highs, China has expanded its foothold in Central America, fentanyl is flooding America, and left-wing NGOs are writing the U.S.’ Central America policy. The only winners of Kamala Harris’s leadership are human traffickers and cartel smugglers. Here are four reasons why Kamala Harris keeps dodging questions about her very public failure to address the root causes of migration.

Empowering Latin American Dictators

Focusing solely on stopping migration from the three northern Central American countries is the equivalent of throwing a bucket of water on a five-alarm house fire. While Honduran and Guatemalan migration is still a problem, Kamala Harris cannot escape her role in paving the way for the historic exodus of Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians through the Biden administration’s weak policies. Anyone charged with addressing the root causes of migration must look at the rise in authoritarianism in the region. Still, Harris and the Biden administration as a whole only encouraged their repressive grip on their populations. Latin America’s authoritarians were never held accountable for willfully using migrants as a weapon against the U.S. Biden dismantled sanctions on Venezuela’s dictatorship, funneling money to prolong the dictatorship. 

Now, Venezuelan encounters at the border have skyrocketed from 284 in January 2021 to nearly 25,000 in December 2021. There was no meaningful U.S. response to the Cuban regime’s crackdown against the innocent July 2021 protestors either. Instead, Biden’s State Department welcomed senior Cuban Communist Party officials, and TSA paraded them around Florida International Airport. Until the Biden-Harris administration, there was no precedent in American history where officials from a U.S. designated State Sponsor of Terrorism were given access to critical American infrastructure. Nicaragua’s dictator, Daniel Ortega, has turned the airport in Managua into an international layover for U.S.-bound migrants worldwide. 

Instead of cracking down on these dictators, Biden and Harris gave them a helping hand. They allowed them to offload their citizens onto the United States by unlawfully granting nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela parole. Naturally, criminals took advantage. A DHS internal report found that 24 of the 1,000 most used social security numbers for sponsors belonged to a deceased person, and over 19,000 applicants recycled the same 100 physical addresses. And now, nearly 95 percent of remittances to Venezuela are sent through illicit financial channels, according to a study by the InterAmerican Dialogue. 

A Failed Anti-Corruption Drive

At the core of the White House’s strategy to stop migration was ending corruption in Central America. A delusional goal was lacking in self-awareness, considering the White House’s current occupants. Instead of focusing on implementing proven deterrence measures like internal enforcement or cooperating on border security with regional counterparts, the White House worked hand in hand with left-leaning NGOs, many funded by USAID and the State Department, to receive recommendations on their preferred targets for sanctions. Congress was never informed of the evidence utilized or the logic of how revoking visas of government officials no longer in power leads to a reduction in migration. 

This means the only Central Americans Kamala Harris stopped from entering America illegally are politicians and private sector officials accused by partisans of previous acts of corruption on matters like climate change violations. At the same time, Kamala claims that she’s galvanized investments from American private sector companies, yet according to USAID, U.S. support in FY23 created a little more than 26,000 jobs in Guatemala. That same year, Biden and Harris spent over $212 million of U.S. taxpayer funds in Guatemala and processed over 220,000 at the southern border. Around this same time, the U.S. federal government has spent $66 billion on illegal immigrants, not counting the costs borne at the state and local levels. 

Neglecting China’s Growing Influence

Latin America is home to the bulk of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, specifically the Central American and Caribbean subregions. It is their unfortunate luck that Biden appointed Harris to lead U.S. efforts in both areas. U.S. policy towards the Caribbean became an extension of the Left’s myopic obsession with combatting climate change at the expense of pushing back on China’s growing malign influence and narcotics trafficking. Under Vice President Harris’s watch, Central America lost two longtime allies of Taiwan due to Chinese overtures. In Nicaragua, America chose to be outgunned and outmaneuvered by the CCP due to the Biden administration’s decision to permit the consolidation of Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship. While China invests in key infrastructure projects in the region, the Biden-Harris administration turned the Development Finance Corporation into a progressive social impact bank. 

However, Kamala Harris’s personal involvement with Honduras’s leftist leader is the embodiment of her foreign policy ineptitude. In January 2022, Xiomara Castro, the wife of former Honduran president and alleged narcotics trafficker Mel Zelaya, became Honduras’s president. Despite longstanding, credible allegations of criminal activity against Castro and Zelaya, Kamala Harris attended her inauguration and became personally invested in the success as Honduras’s first woman president. And even though Castro staffed her administration with her equally corrupt relatives, Kamala Harris showered Honduras with U.S. foreign aid and promises of American investments. 

Within a year, Castro would embarrass the United States, end Honduras’ nearly seventy-five-year-long relationship with Taiwan, and establish ties with China. Her government would go on to engage in systematic harassment of U.S. businesses, back the Venezuelan dictatorship, and even seemingly solicit bribes from Honduras’ top drug traffickers. Harris’ comprehensive failure in her regional efforts exemplifies the void left by the complete and total absence of American leadership. 

Ideology, Not “Root Causes”

Ultimately, it does not take an expert understanding of foreign policy to conclude that Biden and Kamala were never interested in stopping illegal immigration to the United States. Starting on day one, Biden and Harris unilaterally dismantled President Trump’s proven deterrence measures, including cooperation agreements with regional counterparts. They went further and turned their backs on pro-American leaders in Guatemala and El Salvador who sought to coordinate efforts against cascading flows of illegal immigrants making their way to the southern border—all because these leaders did not embrace social policies that were in line with the progressive establishment. Notably, Biden-Harris withheld crucial aid from El Salvador as President Bukele at a key time when he was cracking down on the violent gangs that once controlled the small Central American nation. This failure was long in the making and arguably publicly announced when the White House published its root causes of migration strategy, which reads like the ramblings of a left-wing academic. 

Kamala Harris must stop dodging the American people and own up to her mistakes. The media should also scrutinize her track record like they routinely do with Donald Trump. If they chose to do so, the facts would clearly demonstrate that despite her objections, Kamala Harris failed America as the border czar. 

About the Author 

Ana Rosa Quintana-Lovett is the Senior Policy Director at the Vandenberg Coalition. Until recently, she was the principal Latin America advisor for the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Staff Director for the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. Prior to that, she led the Western Hemisphere portfolio at The Heritage Foundation.

Image: Maxim Elramsisy / Shutterstock.com.