VP Harris Gets Defensive During Long-Awaited Border Visit

By 

Jordan Sekulow

|
June 25, 2021

4 min read

Immigration

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We just told you that Vice President Kamala Harris is finally visiting our southern border today to address the immigration crisis. She should’ve gone to the border six months ago. She should be visiting the main problem area. Instead, she’s going to one of the most manageable zones on the border: any area in El Paso, Texas, and she’s staying for only two hours. To put it simply – she is going to the wrong spot at the wrong time.

When Vice President Harris was asked why today was suddenly the right time to make her first trip to the border, she got extremely defensive in her response:

It’s not my first trip, I’ve been to the border many times. . . . So, the important aspect of this visit is leading this visit after the work we did in Guatemala and Mexico. I said back in March I was going to come to the border, so this is not a new plan, but the reality of it is we have to deal with the causes and we have to deal with the effects.

To be clear, this is what she said back in March:

Um, not today. But I have before and I’m sure I will again.

That is not a response that yields a lot of confidence for the American people that Vice President Harris actually had plans at all to visit, let alone take this matter seriously. It seems more likely that she decided to play Follow the Leader and only go to the border after former President Trump announced he would go.

ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave his insight into whether any changes will come out of Vice President Harris’ visit or if it will just be a box to check before former President Trump visits:

I can’t imagine that tomorrow there will be fewer people that come across than today or that today there will be fewer people that came across than yesterday as a result of her trip down to the border. It doesn’t appear to be a particularly serious effort. It looks like she is going down there to complete a task that has been on her to-do list for an awfully long time that she caught flack for handling poorly. Sadly, we focus so much on her travel down there. I’m happy if she doesn’t travel down there if she would actually address the crisis at our southern border. If they can actually fix it. If their actions actually delivered in the way that we did for 4 years in the Trump Administration. It took us a while to get it right, but we had this issue in a place where we understood who was coming across our border. We had clarity about what was going to happen and I think people all across Central America and Mexico and the world knew that our southern border was closed. . . . I can’t imagine this will convince anyone who is thinking about coming across our border illegally to change their plans.

Founder and CEO Ned Ryun of American Majority also joined us live to discuss his new book, The Adversaries: A Story of Boston and Bunker Hill. Ned described the inspiration behind writing this book:

In the opening author’s note I say this: history done well is like the wind on our backs. It should inspire us; it should move us to action. And that’s one of the reasons we need to go back and look at the founding of the American Republic. It should inspire us but also should motivate us to action today in the 21st century of America because that’s how you actually achieve change.

Unfortunately, we have not seen anything close to the kind of meaningful action Ryun is talking about – especially not at our southern border, from the Biden Administration. While we would hope to see effective, consequential policy changes after the Vice President’s visit today to the border, we know there very likely may not be any changes at all.

At the ACLJ, we are calling this exactly what it is - a humanitarian crisis - and we are taking action to end it before it’s too late. We filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration for their mishandling of the situation at the southern border and won’t give up until we see real progress.

Today’s full Sekulow broadcast is complete with even more analysis of Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to the southern border.

Watch the full broadcast below.