Vice President Kamala Harris, along with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, will travel to the U.S. – Mexico border on Friday, according to officials within the White House.
The vice president was given charge of finding away to stem the tide of illegal immigrants flooding across the border into the United States earlier this year.
The vice president’s trip comes after Harris traveled to Guatemala and Mexico to meet with leaders to discuss the surge of migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. She was criticized from both sides of the political divide for her sometimes-uneven performance on her first foreign trip as vice president, struggling with questions about a border visit and stumbling during a press conference that wrapped the trip.
Prior to that trek, Harris had shot down calls from Republicans for her to go to the border and personally observe the situation, claiming that she had been tasked with addressing the root causes of northern migration in Central American and South American countries while Mayorkas was overseeing the response to illegal border crossings in the Southwest.
She maintained her focus on those issues while visiting the two countries by meeting with multiple groups of local activists and addressing corruption concerns with both Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei.
It’s worth noting that Harris’ visit will fall just five days before former President Donald Trump is due to travel down to Texas to join Gov. Greg Abbott in a tour of the border to get a good look at what is really happening.
Not long after the trip was announced by Harris’ staff, Trump put out a statement smashing the Biden administration for getting rid of some of the immigration policies he had in place during his term.
“After months of ignoring the crisis at the Southern Border, it is great that we got Kamala Harris to finally go and see the tremendous destruction and death that they’ve created—a direct result of Biden ending my very tough but fair Border policies,” Trump went on to say. “Harris and Biden were given the strongest Border in American history. And now, it is by far the worst in American history.”
“If Governor Abbott and I weren’t going there next week, she would have never gone!” he declared.
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