Vice President Kamala Harris has had a tough go of it in the media lately. Deputized to deal with the crisis at the border, she has become the public face of the Biden administration’s biggest policy and public-relations problem.

Harris and her team have protested that her task is really to deal with the root causes of the migration surge — humanitarian and economic problems in the migrants’ countries of origin, they say — while the Department of Homeland Security handles the border itself.