A slew of challenges at the southern border will hang over Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday as she visits Baltimore to close her first 100 days in office, returning to the city that was her presidential campaign hub to claim early successes on other issues.
Harris is expected to pitch the White House’s pandemic recovery effort, proposals to create jobs and help families, as well as efforts to get COVID-19 vaccinations into arms. Officials say she has played a crucial role on each matter.
According to a White House official, Harris was instrumental in ensuring aid to small businesses made it into the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and also pushed for investments in broadband, electric school buses, water infrastructure modernization, and the cleanup of toxic waste sites.
During negotiations over the coronavirus spending package earlier this year, Harris repeatedly advocated for small businesses, which secured $60 billion in the final package. She also pushed for child care benefits and a child tax credit, which she had championed as a senator.
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On Thursday, Harris will be joined by Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan during a visit to M&T Bank Stadium, which was transformed into a mass-vaccination site in a matter of weeks as part of a public-private partnership between the University of Maryland Medical System and the Maryland Air National Guard.
White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients credits Harris with expanding the administration’s field of vision regarding vaccine access.
The vice president’s “thoughtful and experienced approach to equity issues is why we’re talking about COVID-19 equity in the broadest sense,” Zients said, pointing to rural communities, inmates, and people living in poverty or with disabilities.
Baltimore is “not unlike” Harris’s native Oakland, California, Harris’s presidential campaign Chairwoman and sister, Maya Harris, told the Baltimore Sun in 2019. In that way, it is a fitting choice for the then-candidate and senator from the country’s largest state to end the so-called “honeymoon” that new presidents and their vice presidents traditionally receive.
“It is like a sister city,” Maya Harris said at the time. It “has history, and it has culture. It is vibrant in myriad ways.”
“But it also has ways in which it is still coming into its own. There are places where we still have more work to do. That is not unlike where we have grown up,” she said.
Harris ended her bid in early December, stepping away before the first Democratic primary contest in Iowa, and ended up in the White House regardless.
‘Fraught with political peril’
Now, Harris faces the challenge of halting the number of people seeking to cross the border illegally.
“After the administration correctly focused most of their attention on dealing with COVID, they’re beginning to think a little bit more about how to use her,” said Democrat Jim Manley, a former top aide to onetime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
It’s a potentially toxic issue that one former adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign called “fraught with political peril.”
“There are a lot of political careers in the graveyard of immigration policy on both sides of the aisle,” this person said. “Marco Rubio hasn’t touched the issue in a long time. John McCain. George Bush. Even Ronald Reagan had his challenges with immigration.”
A new CNN poll conducted from April 21-26 identifies bipartisan concern about the border. Among 1,004 respondents, 78% said they view the situation as a crisis, compared to 19% who said it is not a crisis. Moreover, while 29% of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the issue, more than double the number disapprove, at 65%.
More than 160,000 family units and 18,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended at the border in March, overwhelming federal capacity.
Harris met virtually with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei to discuss the issue and pledged during the meeting to send an additional $310 million in foreign aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Officials believe that humanitarian aid, private sector investment, and a clampdown on corruption will stop people from migrating northward by improving conditions in their home countries.
Though the White House bills Harris’s task as purely diplomatic, she faces difficulties on the homefront amid charges she is not doing enough.
The migration issue has plagued past Democratic and Republican administrations. But a new strategy initiated by the Biden administration upon taking office quickly flooded the system.
Seeking to distance themselves from the Trump team, Biden officials ceased immediately deporting children under a Trump-era policy that had allowed adults, children, and families to be turned away at the border instead of taken into custody.
‘Incredibly tricky’
The number of unaccompanied migrant children quickly spiked to historic numbers, overwhelming facilities.
Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials have seized on her failure to visit the U.S.-Mexico border.
Former Trump administration White House chief of staff Mark Meadows took aim at both Harris and Biden in a recent tweet, arguing that the absence of a visit was evidence the duo isn’t taking adequate stock of the situation.
Meadows wrote: “Of the many ways Biden/Harris are showing you they don’t take the border crisis they created seriously, perhaps the most obvious: Kamala Harris gets put in charge of fixing it in March. She reportedly doesn’t plan to visit the border until June.”
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Notably, Republicans view the border muddle as a political cudgel for the 2022 midterm elections, as Democrats seek to hold on to the slimmest of margins in the House and Senate.
With Harris leading a large part of the administration’s search for solutions, Manley summed up her next 100 days, and beyond, succinctly: “This is incredibly tricky stuff.”
