EL PASO, Texas — Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday used her first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office to call for an end to political “rhetoric” and “infighting” over immigration, an issue that Republicans have been eager to weaponize against her.
Immigration “cannot be reduced to a political issue,” Harris told reporters. “We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we’re talking about suffering. And our approach has to be thoughtful and effective.”
Harris’s trip came after months of criticism from Republicans and some in her own party over her absence and that of President Joe Biden from the border at a time when immigration officers have logged record numbers of encounters with migrants attempting to cross into the U.S.
Her half-day stop — in which she toured a Customs and Border Protection processing center and met with migrant children there, visited an intake center on the border and held a roundtable with local service providers — is unlikely to quell GOP efforts to use immigration as a political cudgel against the administration.
Harris defended both the timing of her visit and the choice of El Paso for the stop. Some critics had said the location is too far removed from the epicenter of border crossings creating a strain on federal resources. She told reporters after landing in El Paso that she had said in March that she would come to the border and it was “not a new plan.”
And she said the choice of El Paso was meant to underscore a shift to a more humane approach to immigration policy by the Biden administration after the hardline stance of former President Donald Trump.
“It is here in El Paso that the previous administration’s child separation policy was unveiled,” she said.
She also noted Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, which forced asylum seekers to wait on the other side of the border for their claims to be adjudicated.
“We have seen the disaster that resulted from that here in El Paso,” she said.
Harris visited the region with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Texas Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar and Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, a prominent Democratic voice on immigration reform. Both Mayorkas and Escobar said they invited Harris specifically to the area.
But Republicans faulted Harris for a trip that they dismissed as little more than a photo session. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a conservative Republican and leading administration critic on immigration, charged that Biden’s policies “opened the floodgates to human smugglers and drug cartels.”
While Cruz said he was glad Harris had visited, “if the vice president came to Texas without a concrete plan to secure our border and is unwilling to reverse her administration’s failed immigration policies that caused the crisis, then her visit is nothing short of a glorified photo-op.”
Trump said on Friday in an interview with the conservative outlet Newsmax that “I think she should go to the real part of the border, not a part of the border that’s seldom violated.”