Vice President Kamala Harris’s trip to El Paso is not about politics, the White House said, but the specter of former Republican President Donald Trump looms over the high-profile visit.
After visiting the region and meeting with Mexico’s president, President Joe Biden said Harris had now “set up the criteria” to visit the border.
This follows months of scrutiny over Harris’s efforts, as lawmakers from both parties urged the vice president to make the trip.
HARRIS URGED TO VISIT BORDER ‘HOT SPOTS’ ON EVE OF FIRST TRIP
The chorus reached a fever pitch in recent weeks as Harris met with leaders in Mexico and Guatemala as part of her role to help curb immigration to the border. And while the White House had sought to distance the vice president from the domestic crisis, officials now say this is the next step.
The number of attempted border crossings has surged in recent months, yielding a cudgel to Democrats’ political opponents in the lead-up to the 2022 elections.
Here are three things to watch as the vice president visits Texas.
Where she’ll be
While in El Paso, Harris will tour a Customs and Border Protection central processing facility, sit down with advocates from faith-based groups as well as shelter and legal services providers, and deliver remarks.
The vice president will take a tour of the facility and receive an operational briefing. She is joined on the trip by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who is also the Judiciary Committee chairman, and Democratic Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar.
Lawmakers have asked why Harris isn’t visiting the “hot spots” further south.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Mayorkas said El Paso was his idea, explaining that “it is one of the busiest sectors” of the border.
“It provides the vice president with an opportunity to see the full array” of challenges handled by the department “and the great work that we do at the border,” he said.
However, more than twice as many people have attempted crossings in the lower Rio Grande Valley compared to El Paso, according to federal data.
Symone Sanders, the vice president’s senior adviser and chief spokeswoman, drew a link between the choice and Trump’s hard-line immigration policies on Thursday and said Harris would point to this while in Texas.
“El Paso was also the place, the birthplace, if you will, of the previous administration’s family separation policy,” Sanders said. “It was piloted there in 2017 before it was widely applied in 2018.”
And where she won’t be
Don’t expect a visit to a migrant detention facility housing unaccompanied children at Fort Bliss. The Health and Human Services Department-operated center is under scrutiny amid reports that conditions are “unacceptable.”
Asked about this, Sanders said the administration was responding.
“This is serious for the president and the vice president. And we know it’s serious and important to HHS to get to the bottom of this and ensure that the highest standards are being upheld,” she said.
Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar told the Washington Examiner he was “grateful” Harris was visiting the border, but he said he hoped she’d make a second trip. The congressman wants Harris to set eyes on the “hot” spots and meet with border officials and residents living under the stress of the migrant spike.
“Politically, it’s safer to go [to El Paso], but if you want to get a real idea of what’s happening at the border, you’ve got to go where the hot spot is, and that is the lower Rio Grande,” said Cuellar, a centrist Democrat, who invited Harris to his district in a letter last week.
Why now?
White House officials and people close to Harris have said the scheduling isn’t related to a visit next week by Trump or political pressure by opponents.
Instead, administration aides have credited the White House’s efforts to get a handle on the crisis.
For months, processing facilities have been overwhelmed by the spike in children and families in their care after the Biden administration stopped immediately deporting both groups under a Trump-era public health rule.
“This timing is what made sense both for the vice president’s schedule but also for our partners on the ground,” Sanders said, billing the trip as a natural progression of the vice president’s tasks.
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“This is really about building on the work that she has been doing. This is not happening in a vacuum. And it is not just to go and see. She has seen before,” Sanders said.
She added: “I cannot stress enough this idea of cause and effect. When you talk about addressing the root causes of migration, the entirety of the immigration work of the administration is connected.”
