Not very, and here are the stats to prove it

By Andrew R. Arthur on August 5, 2024

There’s been much discussion of late about the role Vice President (and presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris has played in the Biden-Harris administration’s border crisis. Republicans (and a few Democrats) point out that she was “border czar” and thus bears her share of the blame, while her supporters contend she was tasked only with dealing with the “root causes” of illegal migration in Central America and nothing else.

So, assuming that she was responsible only for root causes, how fruitful have her efforts been in that regard? Not very, and the statistics prove it. The short version of the story is that while total apprehensions (inflated by Title 42 expulsions during Covid) of aliens from what you might call the root-causes countries did indeed decline, apprehensions of aliens processed under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), so-called “Title 8” apprehensions, have grown significantly, as have grants of parole at the ports of entry to inadmissible aliens.

Southwest Border Apprehensions from the “Northern Triangle”. Even as illegal migration from outside North America has exploded, the Biden-Harris administration’s root causes strategy has focused on illegal migration from just three countries in Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The three are known collectively as the “Northern Triangle”. 

In FY 2021, the year Harris undertook that root causes task, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended nearly 684,000 illegal entrants from the Northern Triangle. (Because the fiscal year starts on the previous calendar year’s October 1, about 588,000 of those apprehensions were made under the Biden-Harris administration.) Southwest border apprehensions of nationals of those three countries dropped to fewer than 521,000 in FY 2022 and declined further to just over 447,000 in FY 2023. 

In the first nine months of FY 2024, Border Patrol agents have apprehended nearly 314,000 illegal Northern Triangle migrants at the U.S.-Mexico line and are on track to hit about 418,600 this fiscal year.

Based on those statistics alone, illegal migration has fallen in the three-plus fiscal years that Harris has root-causes portfolio. Expect her campaign (and her legion of allies in the media) to focus on those figures alone and claim success. 

Those apprehension totals, however, only tell part of the story – and paint a slightly dimmer picture. 

The first thing to understand is that the Biden-Harris administration actually inherited a very secure border, as illegal migration from the Northern Triangle in particular was fairly low when the duo took office. 

Read More Here:

https://cis.org/Arthur/How-Fruitful-Have-Kamala-Harriss-Root-Causes-Efforts-Been