Harris really does have a magic wand for the border

The most brazen claim Vice President Kamala Harris made at the U.S.-Mexico border last week was that to fix the border, we must elect her—as if she’s powerless to do anything now.

Speaking in Arizona, Harris acknowledged, “there are consequential issues at stake in this election. And one is the security of our border.” She even admitted, “The United States is a sovereign nation and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them. And I take that responsibility very seriously.”

And the plan she laid out could have been cobbled together by former Clinton appointees or even a Bush administration: “I will do more to secure our border. To reduce illegal border crossings, I will take further action to keep the border closed between ports of entry. Those who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended and removed and barred from reentering for five years. We will pursue more severe criminal charges against repeat violators. And if someone does not make an asylum request at a legal point of entry and instead crosses our border unlawfully, they will be barred from receiving asylum.”

But here’s the thing—Harris doesn’t need the presidency to do any of that. She’s not proposing a new approach to immigration or even a slate of reforms to the existing system. She’s simply saying her administration will enforce existing law. But isn’t that her job now?

The fact is that Harris and President Joe Biden have thrown open the U.S. border. According to a U.S. House report, “Under President Biden’s watch, there have been over 8 million migrant encounters nationwide, 6.7 million of which have been at the Southwest border.”

It adds, “Worse yet, over 1.7 million known gotaways—illegal immigrants who have evaded Border Patrol— are now living in the interior of the United States without documentation and without having undergone any vetting by immigration officials.”

Still, it’s wrong to call the southern U.S. border “uncontrolled.” It’s fully controlled—by the criminal cartels that operate with impunity in Mexico. As my colleague, former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told that House committee, the “[cartels] control the border today. And they control the border today under the Biden administration because of this mass migration to a level that they’ve never had.” 

And as he wrote recently, it was a systematic dismantling of our laws.

“By December 2020, the U.S. had the most secure border in the history of our nation, and a proven plan to continue improvements. We had an overall decrease in entries and the highest level of situational awareness ever,” he said.

But the Biden-Harris administration undid all of that on Day One.

It began with terminating the Migrant Protection Protocols and the shutting down of all construction of the physical border wall. The decades-long strategy of deterrence was ditched for a schizophrenic approach that not only fails to enforce federal laws, but also seeks to punish states like Texas, which have to deal with the policy failure day in and day out.

Still, it’s progress, at least, that Harris even visited the border. It may be a response to her underwater polling numbers, particularly on the topic of immigration, but it’s a response nonetheless. In her speech, she indicated she knows that Americans have a right to demand border security. She even said, “we must tackle this issue from every angle because our highest charge must be to protect the lives of our people.”

Here’s the good news, Madame Vice President: You don’t have to wait. You don’t even have to reinstate Trump-era policies or enact new reforms. The comically named “border security bill” isn’t needed, either. The laws are already in place.

Kamala Harris doesn’t need the Oval Office or the Resolute Desk for our border to become secure again. The Biden-Harris administration just needs the political will to enforce the law.

Rob Henneke is the executive director and general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.