Vice President Kamala Harris flipped a question at her Friday press conference in Texas into a chance to attack former President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies.
Republicans and even some Democrats had previously criticized the vice president for making her first border trip to El Paso, a city nearly 1,000 miles away from what they call the epicenter of the border crisis, and the first question at Harris’s press conference asked why she selected El Paso over an area like the Rio Grande Valley.
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“So first of all, what is happening here in El Paso really is, in many ways, highlights many facets on the issue of immigration,” Harris answered. “It is here in El Paso that the previous administration’s child separation policy was unveiled, and so we’ve seen the disastrous effects of that right here in this region.”
“It is here, El Paso, that the ‘Return to Mexico’ policy from the previous administration was implemented,” she continued. “We have seen the disaster that resulted from here in El Paso.”
Harris claimed that “this has been a very important trip.”
“This has been a trip that is also connected with the obvious point. If you want to deal with a problem, you can’t just deal with the symptoms of the problem. You’ve got to figure out what caused it to happen,” she said. “Which is why, after taking a leadership role on root causes, one of the first trips I took was to Guatemala and Mexico, to see on the ground there.”
Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar previously told the Washington Examiner that Harris’s selection of El Paso was “safer” politically than visiting the Rio Grande Valley.
“I got several texts, and one phone call also, from people in my district, ‘Why is she going over there? She should be coming here. She should, ought to be here,'” Cuellar said in an interview. “Even Border Patrol yesterday, people that I know, said, ‘Why not down to the valley?’ And I don’t know how to answer them. I don’t know the rationale why.”
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“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,” he added. “I hope that she’ll go down 800-900 miles down the border sometime in the future, to the lower Rio Grande Valley. That’s where the Donna Border Patrol facilities are, the [Health and Human Services] facilities are for kids. That’s where they’re doing prosecutorial discretion releases. That’s where the majority of the numbers are.”
