Is Kamala Harris a “Failed Border Czar?” Immigration Expert Weighs In

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, while the economy is the top issue for voters, immigration isn’t far behind. We heard yesterday from El Paso Congresswoman Veronica Escobar. And now, Hari Sreenivasan speaks to Jonathan Blitzer about it. He’s the staff writer for The New Yorker, and he talks about Kamala Harris and why border policy is such a vexing problem in the United States.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. Thanks so much for joining us. Let’s talk a little bit about immigration. You have been reporting on this for quite some time. You had a recent piece, The Real Story of Kamala Harris’ Record on Immigration in The New Yorker. And from the Trump side or people who support the president, they are labeling Kamala Harris as the borders czar, a failed one, and ineffective one. But is that fair?

JONATHAN BLITZER, AUTHOR, “EVERYONE WHO IS GONE IS HERE” AND STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: In a word, no. In a word, it’s inaccurate. And the reason for it is, first of all, that the vice president was never in charge of the border. In fact, there’s no one who ever had a title quite like the one Republicans wish existed that would allow them to shift the blame directly to a single person. But what the vice president was responsible for in the early years of the Biden administration was to address root causes of migration from Central America, and specifically from the Northern Triangle of Central America. So, three countries in Central America, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, that have historically sent large numbers of families to the southern border to seek asylum. And so, she was in charge of the, frankly, rather thankless task of needing to address some of the underlying reasons why people were fleeing their homes in such large numbers. And as a political matter, it’s sort of a dreaded subject, I think, for someone with sort of broader political ambitions, because on a good day if you’re able to cut through all of the complex policy questions and all of the complex regional political questions, you’re looking at the work of years, if not decades, to begin to improve conditions on the ground that would fundamentally change people’s calculus when it comes to whether or not they want to stay home or leave for United States. And so, it’s very hard to get engaged in that work and to have kind of an immediate tangible demonstration of success. And then, the other complicating factor has been that in the last couple of years, there’s been a profound shift, you know, who is arriving at the U.S. southern border. Now, it’s a much more global population. And so, it was a kind of doubly thankless job because it was, again, quite complex on a good day dealing with these root causes in the region, but of course, now, that the global forces driving mass migration are so much more varied and international, that it’s not enough just to be focused on Central America. So, the Republicans are trying to make it out to be the case that Harris was responsible for sort of all of the mixed bag of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, and it just doesn’t land.

SREENIVASAN: You know, when you look at how the Trump administration tries to contrast itself with what’s been happening on the border in the past two years versus, say, the last two years of the Trump administration, what are they getting right? What are they getting wrong?

BLITZER: The Trump administration did not have the success in managing numbers at the border, quite like they want you to think they did. The Trump administration attempted some of the most monstrous policies we’ve ever seen at the southern border. I’m thinking most specifically of separating families, separating parents and children in an effort to discourage other families from coming in the first place. That was in 2018. In 2019, you had the largest number of border arrivals in years. I think ultimately, what allowed the Trump administration to sort of claim success at the southern border. insofar as they felt like they had stemmed the tide of arrivals, was a combination of things, but a big factor in all of it was the pandemic. And so, you know, that was a very unique historical circumstance. I think what has really troubled their case against the current administration is the fact that in the last year, the Biden administration has, I think, really kind of pivoted much more forcefully on the border issue. And as you know, the Biden administration has backed this Senate negotiation, a bipartisan Senate negotiation that was basically willing to really substantially overhaul how asylum worked at the southern border. And it was written by one of the most conservative members of the Senate. And what happened was, as this bill emerged in February of this year, Republicans got word from Trump himself that he wanted them to sabotage the deal because it was such a potent campaign issue for him. And so, the Democrats ever since essentially pitched themselves as the party that’s actually willing to be tough and practical at the southern border when it comes to asylum and these issues. While the Republicans are just demagoguing on the issue and are nihilistic about that kind of broader values and policy stakes that they’re just in it for the cynicism. And I think the Republicans, in that sense, have an uphill battle in actually proving that they substantially care about the issue.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder if the Democrats are seeing a significant pushback from the more progressive wing with the kind of rhetoric that they’re using and maybe the policies that they’re advocating for, which might not sit well on kind of the other side of the spectrum saying, hey, you’re behaving and advocating ways that are inhumane or uncompassionate.

BLITZER: You know, I’m glad you mentioned that because it’s been extremely striking to me, here at the convention and in general in the kind of campaign landscape right now, how muted this issue has been among Democrats, particularly if it’s more progressive bet. I think there is a widespread consensus in the party, that is not wrong, that the asylum system has sort of just been overtaken at this point by dysfunction, by political attacks that is just not working the way it’s supposed to work. And I really think this has been a market shift since, I would say, the summer of 2022 when the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, started busing migrants in huge numbers to Democratic cities across the country, doing it without coordinating local or state authorities, doing it very deliberately to cause chaos. You have seen a real recognition inside the Democratic Party that something has to be done with asylum. It has to be reckoned with, this issue, in some form or another. And so, there’s less dissension, I think, than there really ever has been when it comes to the border. But I think the way that it’s felt, and I think probably the way in which it troubles progressives the most, frankly, it troubles me too as someone who follows this stuff, is the degree to which the border has effective hijacked the broader conversation about immigration in America. A lot of the other key priorities for Democrats have effectively fallen out of the conversation. I mean, it was very fascinating to see on the first day of the convention a major Biden administration policy went into effect. They got no mention. And that was a really laudable effort to create a legal opportunity for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, half a million of them, to regularize their status. This is the biggest relief effort from the U.S. administration since DACA, since 2012. And it literally went into effect the day that the convention started. This is a huge win for immigrant families across the country, and it barely got mentioned, if at all. Instead, what got mentioned was the border and how the numbers at the southern border have dropped, and they have dropped, but that’s been the kind of the dominant frame.

SREENIVASAN: You know, how do you think that the critiques from both the left and the right have shaped Kamala Harris’ thinking about what — well, she will eventually do if she’s elected president?

BLITZER: I think the vice president is sort of launching herself as a presidential nominee at an interesting moment in the arc of the Biden administration’s sort of evolving approach to immigration and the border. The administration has kind of hit a sweet spot, rhetorically anyway, also in terms of policy, but they’ve managed now to have a kind of theory of the case that they can articulate to the public. The theory of the case is this. We have to be much tougher on asylum seekers when they are crossing in between ports of entry at the southern border. In other words, when they’re crossing irregularly or illegally, when they’re not presenting themselves at ports of entry. So, for those people, we need to really bar asylum. But at the same time, what the administration has said is, OK, we’re not closing the door on people in desperate need to arrive — to come into the United States, we’re creating other legal channels for them to do so. And so, at ports of entry, for example, they’re creating appointments using an app that allow people to schedule the actual date and time of their arrival at the southern border, so it’s more orderly and manageable when they arrive. The administration’s created a parole program which is very substantial and very significant in which they basically allow, you know, 30,000 migrants a month to actually come into the country if they have a sponsor in the United States. Now, this program right now is being held up but it has been in effect for the last several — last couple of years, and the effects have been significant. The number of arrivals from these countries that have been covered by these policies at the southern border, have dropped by 90 percent as a result of the administration creating other legal avenues for people to enter the country. And so, Kamala Harris inherits this thinking, this way of organizing the issue, which I actually think is quite intuitive to people. The idea of look, we have to be tough at the southern border. We have to be orderly, but we have to also create other avenues for people to enter legally. I think that’s actually a fairly compelling argument, and I think it’s one that she can make and the one that she has made. And then, coupled with all of that is the fact that Republicans tanked this bipartisan border bill earlier in the year. And so, Democrats now also have the claim that, look, we want to deal with this issue, they don’t.

SREENIVASAN: You know, in both your reporting for The New Yorker, as well as your book, that’s called “Everyone Who is Gone is Here,” you really look more deeply into the root causes of what is propelling people to leave their countries and try to get into the United States and also the kind of consequences of U.S. policy and how we deal with that and what ends up happening. So, for example, you know, you write about deportations and what that actually ended up doing to gang violence in those countries, which sort of goes back into feeding that cycle, which is when you create more unsafe and unstable places, people have a tendency to want to leave those places towards safety, which might be the U.S. border, right?

BLITZER: You know, my book and a lot of my reporting over the last decade or so has been about the United States and Central America, because you can see in just such a dramatic way is the interconnectedness of the U.S. and countries in the region to a degree that, you know, politics and immigration law almost can’t account for. I mean, all of these points of connection are just a fact of life. But one of the reasons why they’re part of this landscape is because of the history of U.S. policy, U.S. foreign policy in Central America, U.S. immigration policy in response to domestic political pressures, but there is this cumulative effect to all of this. It fundamentally changes the world in which people live. And it fundamentally changes people’s need to leave. No one wants to leave home. They leave because they don’t have a choice. And so, the U.S. and Central America, it’s an especially dramatic example. Because through the 1980s, there were civil wars raging throughout Central America. The U.S. intervened because of its Cold War interest in trying to contain the spread of leftism in the region. So, you have the United States all through the 1980s supporting repressive military regimes in the region that were driving people to leave because they were getting brutalized by their governments, and the U.S. was looking the other way, arming these governments and providing legal and diplomatic cover. And then, when people arrived at the southern border seeking asylum, the U.S. in — you know, in a discriminatory way, rejected all of these asylum claims of people coming from Central America because to acknowledge these asylum claims would mean acknowledging American complicity and a lot of this violence. Then you fast forward a decade, and you have the kind of war on crime in America, resulting in, you know, mass deportation of people who are hardened on the streets of American inner cities like Los Angeles. The mass deportation of these people without coordination of governments in the region lead to a metastasizing gang culture in Central America, the gang culture that really began in the United States. And so, we fast forward to 2016 say when you have someone like Donald Trump talking about the gang MS-13 like it’s a household name. It’s fascinating and devastating for people who know the history to see a gang that began in Los Angeles in the 1980s kind of turned against immigrants everywhere by a demagogue who wants to make it seem like these gangs have begun abroad and are kind of converging on America, as though America didn’t have a part in all of this.

SREENIVASAN: How do you think the Trump administration, if there’s a second Trump administration, would deal with this? You’ve already seen some of his advisers call for using federal troops for mass deportations. You’ve seen, you know, efforts kind of detailed in the Project 2025 documents that have been floating around. But what do you see is the kind of potential, I guess, legal, international ramifications if a second Trump administration was able to carry these policies out?

BLITZER: So, obviously, the — sort of the MAGA movement in Trump world and people who would be quite influential in a second Trump administration, if that’s what comes to pass, have spoken very explicitly about plans to, you know, arrest people in huge numbers, to hold people in internment camps across the country, to execute a policy of mass deportation. You know, I think it’s important to take these people at their word when they speak this way, I feel conflicted as someone who spends a lot of time covering immigration policy because I can think in my head immediately of all the complicating factors, all the resource constraints, all of the kind of agency and institutional hold ups. Some of the legal challenges that would obviously arise if the administration were to pursue some of these policies. So, I don’t think it’s a clear outcome. It’s hard to know exactly what this would look like. But the fact that this is such a fundamental view of Trump and of the people in his orbit, I think has to be reckoned with because you have such a large undocumented population United States. Immigration enforcement actually has a lot of discretion in terms of who the government goes after. And one of the things that you see, particularly from the sort of second half of the Obama years on, among Democrats, is a desire to exercise much more discretion in who the government targets for arrest if they’re here without legal status. I think the scariest thing about a Trump administration, particularly a Trump administration 2.0, so to speak, is that there would be no priorities for who the government targets for arrest. So, it would be a free for all. And I think that’s a very scary prospect because it means that anyone could be targeted. And it certainly means that racial profiling is a key part of what immigration enforcement increasingly looks like. And so, right now, agencies like ICE have a few kinds of guiding principles, for instance, for places where they can’t make immigration arrests, schools, hospitals, churches. I think that stuff would be thrown right out the window. The idea that there are kind of mitigating factors for, you know, how to consider someone’s immigration case if they’ve got family that depends on them, if they’ve been here for a long time, that stuff would be thrown right out the window. So, I think the kind of randomness that everyone would have to look over their shoulder because the government would be coming after them kind of randomly and, you know, in any way is, I think, something to be reckoned with. And among the scariest are some of the plans that you’ve heard Trump allies and Trump himself tease about almost — I mean, I don’t know how to describe it, military involvement in the wider region to try to stem the flow of migration. I mean, there is a lot of talk in Trump’s inner circle about military incursions into Mexico. I don’t even know what this looks like. I mean, this is an outlandish prospect, but it gets talked about enough, I think, for us to actually have to pay heed. And this is something that came up during the first term. I think it was Mike Pompeo in his memoir, describe it, there wasn’t a day that went by which Trump didn’t ask him, you know, how do we fare in a war against Mexico? I mean, that is an absolutely lunatic notion, but that is tied to this great obsession with immigration enforcement.

SREENIVASAN: Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of the book, “Everyone Who is Gone is Here,” thanks so much for joining us.

BLITZER: Thanks for having me.