A former Border Patrol union leader said Vice President Harris has failed to address the root causes of illegal immigration since President Biden entrusted her with the job in 2021.
“It’s very disappointing,” Brandon Judd, the recently retired president of the Border Patrol union, told Fox News Digital. “We gave her a policy to implement, and she refused to implement it.”
Judd’s comments come as Harris’ record on immigration and border security has come under intense scrutiny following Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and support his running mate to succeed him, with critics saying she faltered on one of the defining issues of the 2024 election.
Biden tapped Harris to lead his administration’s immigration efforts in March 2021, a response to critics who noted an increase in migrant flows just months into his presidency.
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Vice President Harris (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images/File)
According to an Associated Press report on the day of the announcement, Harris will be tasked with overseeing diplomatic efforts in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Administration officials told the AP that Harris will also be tasked with pressing those countries to strengthen immigration enforcement and ensure border security, as well as developing a long-term strategy to address the root causes of migration from those countries.
“The Vice President has agreed to lead the diplomatic effort to work with these countries to accept returnees and strengthen immigration enforcement at the border, among many other things that I’m having her lead, and I appreciate that,” Biden said in the announcement.
“Needless to say, this job is not easy,” Harris said at the time, “but it is important work.”
In late 2021, Harris negotiated a memorandum of understanding with Mexico under which the United States would contribute $4 billion to help Central American countries address the root causes of irregular migration, with private companies investing an additional $5.2 billion for this purpose.
But the vice president’s efforts on the issue quickly fizzled, according to an NBC News report published Thursday, which noted that while Harris visited Mexico in June 2021 and signed an agreement that brought in $4 billion in direct aid and $5.2 billion in public and private investment, she has not visited the border or any countries south of it since January 2022.
According to the report, no new initiatives have been implemented in the root cause strategy beyond 2021.
Still, the share of attempted border crossings by migrants from the Northern Triangle has dropped significantly since 2021. According to government statistics, migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador made up 41% of all migrants apprehended by Border Patrol in 2021. That figure fell to 22% of crossers in fiscal year 2023, the data showed.
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While Northern Triangle crossings have declined, migrants from around the world continued to flow to the U.S. border in 2021, 2022 and 2023, with overall illegal crossings reaching record highs. Thousands of those were from China, and more than 30,000 Chinese migrants were apprehended illegally crossing the southern border in 2023, according to government data.
President Biden speaks with Customs and Border Protection officials during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, on January 8, 2023. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
Judd, who served as union president for much of the current administration, said the issues Harris cited were not the cause of the surge in border crossings.
“The main issues are the root causes that she identified: political instability, climate, crime,” Judd said. “And they were the same under President Trump, but we didn’t see an explosion of illegal immigration under Trump.”
The Trump administration saw a surge in border crossing attempts in 2018, reaching a 12-year high in March 2019. The administration’s response to that surge led to a steady decline in border crossings for the remainder of the year, a trend that accelerated during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, under the current administration, these spikes have reached new heights; [Harris] This law that was created allows people to be released into the United States.”
Harris has long advocated for loosening crackdowns on illegal immigrants, saying in 2015 while she was California’s attorney general that “illegal immigrants are not criminals.”
“I’m a career prosecutor. I’ve personally prosecuted everything from misdemeanors to murder. Unfortunately, I know what crime looks like. I know what criminals who commit crimes look like. Illegal immigrants are not criminals,” Harris said, according to a report in Newsweek magazine.
In a 2019 interview with NPR, when she was a senator from California, Harris said she opposed “any policies that would turn America’s back on people fleeing danger.”
Vice President Harris (Lee Vogel/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images/File)
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“Frankly, I believe this goes against everything we stand for symbolically and in practice,” Harris said, “so I’m not going to implement a law that would reject and turn people away without giving them a fair and due process to determine whether they should be granted asylum or shelter.”
During the 2020 Democratic primary in June 2019, Harris vowed to “immediately put in place a meaningful process for reviewing asylum claims.”
“I will get kids out of cages. I will abolish private detention centers,” Harris said at the debate.
When asked during the debate whether immigrants should be deported if their only crime is being in the country illegally, Harris said “no.”
“They should not be deported,” Harris said.
Harris’ ideas for lax enforcement eventually made their way to the White House, and as reported by the Associated Press, Biden announced in September 2021 that the U.S. would revise the Trump administration’s heavy-handed approach to deportations and instead prioritize only deporting immigrants deemed to pose a threat to public safety.
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Harris’ tone appeared to change during a visit to Honduras in January 2022, her final visit to the Honduran border and countries south of it, where she urged migrants not to attempt to cross into the United States.
“I want to say something very clear to anyone in this region considering making the dangerous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border: Don’t come. Don’t come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and protect our border,” Harris said at the time.
But the now-infamous remarks also sparked backlash from progressives within her own party.
“This is unfortunate,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said on Twitter (X) at the time in response to Harris’ “stay away” remarks. “First, seeking asylum at the US border is a 100% legal form of entry. Second, the US has contributed to regime change and destabilization in Latin America for decades. You can’t set someone’s house on fire and blame them for running away.”
The seemingly contradictory messages from Democrats come as the number of people crossing the border has reached an all-time high under the Biden administration, though numbers have fallen since peaking in December 2023 and hit a three-year low in June.
Biden has also taken action on the border recently, announcing an order to halt the entry of some migrants attempting to cross the border this year.
Meanwhile, White House officials touted the investments VP Harris has secured in Northern Triangle countries and said, “Vice President Harris continues to lead efforts to address the root causes of migration.”
“These investments have created jobs, connected more than 4.5 million people to the internet and brought more than 2.5 million people into the formal financial system,” the official told Fox News Digital. “Under the Vice President’s leadership, the Biden-Harris Administration continues to implement the Root Causes Strategy. As part of this strategy, the Administration will deliver on its commitment to provide $4 billion to the region over four years and will continue to work to eradicate corruption, reduce violence and empower women.”
Vice President Harris speaks during a meeting with leaders of Guatemala’s justice sector at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, on May 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Senator)
But Judd said Harris still doesn’t understand the actual root causes of the migration crisis.
“Nothing has changed from President Trump to this administration,” Judd said of the situation in Latin America. “The instability is still there, the crime is still there, the environment hasn’t changed from the Trump administration to this administration, and illegal immigration has exploded. … She hasn’t addressed any of the root causes and she refuses to acknowledge what the real root causes are.”
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Judd said that the main motivation for immigrants to come to the United States is employment opportunities, and that if Harris had been more successful in addressing the root causes, illegal immigration would have decreased. He also said that Harris has failed at both border security and addressing the root causes.
“If she had addressed the problems she identified, illegal immigration would have decreased, but she didn’t even address the causes she identified,” Judd said.
Those failures, he added, have caused anxiety among the Border Patrol agents Judd once represented.
“They are very unhappy that she was the nominee because all of the Border Patrol agents understand and acknowledge that she had the authority to do border security,” Judd said. “She didn’t do that.”
