(March 24, 2021, Washington, D.C.) – Taking heat from everyone from the President of Mexico to border state Democrats for the humanitarian, health, and national security border crisis his administration has triggered in just two months, President Biden has thrown one architect of the mess, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas under the bus, and tasked another architect of the mess, Vice President Kamala Harris, with fixing it.
"Today's move by President Biden is like pulling Inspector Clouseau off the case and replacing him with Lieutenant Drebin," quipped Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). "Like Secretary Mayorkas, Vice President Harris has a long record of open hostility toward controlling our borders and enforcing our immigration laws."
- In her questioning of former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Ron Vitiello, in 2018, then-Senator Harris compared ICE to the KKK, implying that the agency's enforcement of immigration laws were motivated by racial animus.
- When asked as a presidential candidate in 2019 whether people should be deported for violating U.S. immigration laws, Harris replied, "No, they should not be deported." She went on to boast that as California's attorney general, "I issued a directive to the sheriffs of my state that they did not have to comply with detainers."
- Also, during her own presidential bid, Harris called for what would effectively be the dismantling of ICE. She asserted that it is time to "re-examine" the role of ICE and that we should "probably think about starting from scratch.
Given the vice president's track record of encouraging illegal immigration and disparaging immigration enforcement agencies, President Biden's announcement that she will lead the effort to restore order would be comical if it were not so serious. "I have asked her, the VP, today, because she is the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border," Biden said, apparently without irony.
"President Biden's memory may be a bit faulty, but the rest of us remember that we actually had agreements with Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries that were helping us stem mass migration. He tore them up!" Stein charged. "He also halted construction of the border wall and scrapped numerous other policies put in place by his predecessor that discouraged people from abusing our political asylum process and from putting their kids into the hands of criminal cartels that smuggle them across the border. Until President Biden and Vice President Harris are prepared to restore the policies they blew up, the crisis will continue no matter who's making the photo ops at the border," concluded Stein.
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