DENVER — Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Vice President Kamala Harris’s handling of migration policy shows that she and President Joe Biden are not taking the border crisis seriously.
“They still don’t really say it’s a crisis, but I think they’ve acknowledged inside the White House and elsewhere that they have a significant hurdle to overcome,” Wolf said of the Biden administration in a Washington Examiner interview Friday. “They needed to show that they were taking it seriously, which is why I think the vice president was put ‘in charge of it.’
She has “bungled that very, very badly,” he said. “The fact that she won’t go to the border, I think, is just a larger explanation of them not taking it seriously — of saying that they are but not actually following through.”
PRESSED ON LACK OF BORDER VISIT, HARRIS RETORTS SHE HASN’T ‘BEEN TO EUROPE’ EITHER
Biden put Harris in charge of policy surrounding immigration from Central America, and she traveled to Mexico and Guatemala as part of that mission earlier this month. But Republicans have routinely criticized her for not visiting the southern border. Pressed about a border visit in an interview, Harris quipped she has not “been to Europe” either, prompting widespread backlash.
“She’ll say that she’s in charge of root causes. That’s fine. She’s not going to solve that in the next four years, the next eight years,” Wolf said. “What you can solve this year is the crisis.”
Wolf noted that a Harris trip to the border would bring attention to issues there, comparing her to former Vice President Mike Pence, who traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border several times.
“It’s such a morale boost for the law enforcement down there to say, ‘Hey, you know, leadership in D.C., they care about us. They care about what we’re going through,”” Wolf said. “Instead, they’re getting the opposite message that Harris continues to say, ‘There’s no need for me to go to the border.’ Which is just ludicrous.”
During her visit to Mexico this month, Harris noted she had “been to the border before and will go again.”
Wolf, who led the Department of Homeland Security under former President Donald Trump for a little over a year, spoke at the Western Conservative Summit on Friday. Since leaving the Trump administration, Wolf started a consulting firm and joined the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He frequently speaks about the Biden administration’s changes in border policy, such as removing the “Stay in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers.
“I’m not sure why you would let everyone in, allow them to stay here, knowing that you’re gonna have to remove 90% of them,” Wolf said about Biden’s asylum policy. “But then at the same time, you tell [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], ‘You can’t remove 90% of them.’”
Wolf senses the undoing of Trump administration Homeland Security policies was partly due to “Trump derangement syndrome” in which officials think, “If it was a program, and it was started under Trump, then it had to be bad,” Wolf said.
But more importantly, Wolf said, the Biden administration has an entirely different core philosophy on what it means to secure the border.
“For us, it was enforcing the law. The rule of law was important — holding people accountable that cross that border illegally,” Wolf said, while the Biden administration “continue[s] to treat this like a capacity issue … Building more and more facilities only encourages more and more to come.”
“They know what’s going on. And it’s been intentional. And I think that’s what the American people have to ask themselves: Why are they doing this?” Wolf said. “I don’t believe that they believe in immigration enforcement at the end of the day.”
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Despite criticisms of the Biden administration, Wolf did have a compliment: “Some of the things they’re doing in the cybersecurity realm are actually positive.”
Wolf left the Trump administration in January about a week before Biden’s inauguration, citing legal challenges to his authority as acting secretary as a key factor in his early departure. The Government Accountability Office said last year that Wolf was not legally eligible to serve in his position, and a federal judge in November 2020 said Wolf did not have the legal authority to halt new applications to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
