Kudos to Kessler
By Andrew R. Arthur on October 11, 2024
Vice President (and Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris recently sat down for a variety of interviews, some serious (with Bill Whittaker of CBS News’s “60 Minutes”), others not so much (with Alex Cooper of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Howard Stern, and the women of “The View”). The Washington Post’s “fact checker”, Glenn Kessler, analyzed Harris’s claims on two border issues — an administration immigration bill and fentanyl smuggling — and found them wanting.
“The First Bill We Proposed to Congress Was to Fix Our Broken Immigration System”. During his interview with the Veep, Whittaker focused in on border policy, noting that “there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration”, and that in fact “arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump”.
He then asked Harris directly: “Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”
The vice president never really answered the question, first offering deflection, describing illegal entries as “a longstanding problem” and then claiming, “solutions are at hand”. She next asserted: “And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions”.
She returned to that “day one” theme later in the interview, telling Whittaker: “The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up”.
While it’s debatable whether or not the administration needs congressional action to “fix the border” (you can read my 61 pages of congressional testimony on the question here), Kessler focused on that “first bill” the administration sent to the Hill that Harris referenced, H.R. 1177, the “U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021”.
The Biden-Harris “U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021” was never even considered in committee by the Democratic-majority Congress, underscoring how unserious a proposal it was.
As the Center explained in February 2021, that bill would have done three things: “[l]egalize virtually all illegal immigrants in the United States, weaken immigration enforcement, and double future legal immigration”. It also would have extended immigration relief to an untold number of criminal aliens, as I noted later.
Kessler concurred with many of those points, explaining the bill “mostly focused on creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and expanding legal immigration”, that it “did not call for additional Border Patrol agents — something that Harris now says is essential — and it did not change the asylum process”.
Consequently, he concluded that Harris’s statements about that bill were “misleading”.
Curiously, Kessler failed to also note that Harris’s fellow Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in the 117th Congress then sitting when that bill was offered up — the latter chamber solely by dint of Harris’s role as president of the Senate.
Accordingly, H.R. 1177 failed due to the inaction of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). In fact, it was never even considered in committee, underscoring how unserious a proposal it was.
“We Have Cut the Flow of Fentanyl by Half”. Kessler also examined Harris’s claims that her administration had sharply reduced the flow of fentanyl into the country.
During her “60 Minutes” interview, Harris claimed in response to Whittaker’s border questioning that: “We have cut the flow of fentanyl by half”.
Similarly, later on “The View”, the vice president asserted: “In terms of executive action, we have seen illegal immigrants reduced by half, the intake of fentanyl reduced by half. But ultimately, if we want a real fix to this, Congress has to act”.
Kessler spoke to a Harris campaign aide about this claim, who explained that the candidate, “was speaking about the more than doubling of fentanyl seizures during the Biden-Harris administration, from 11,200 pounds in fiscal year 2021 to 27,000 pounds in fiscal year 2023”.
CBP statistics do show that the total amount of fentanyl seized by the agency rose from 11,200 pounds in FY 2021, to 14,700 pounds in FY 2022, and to 27,000 pounds in FY 2023 — a 141-percent increase over that three-year period, and a roughly 84-percent rise between FY 2022 and FY 2023.
As Kessler added (correctly) however: “In fiscal year 2024, with just one month of data left to count, seizures have dropped to 19,700 pounds”. That would project out to a 10.4-percent decline in fentanyl seizures.
Kessler wasn’t finished, though, continuing: “Moreover, fentanyl seizures are an imperfect metric. It could mean that law enforcement is doing a better job. But more seizures also might indicate that the drug flow has increased, and that law enforcement is missing even more”.
Those are points I’ve made numerous times in the past, but I would have added that Border Patrol seizures of fentanyl increased even more quickly than CBP seizures overall (Border Patrol is a component of CBP, and shares both credit and responsibility for agency drug seizures with CBP officers at the ports of entry).
In FY 2021, agents seized 1,000 pounds of the drug, compared to 2,200 pounds in FY 2022 (more than doubling the prior year’s total) and 2,800 pounds in FY 2023 — a 180-percent increase over that three-year period.
In the first 11 months of FY 2024, agents seized an additional 2,400 pounds of fentanyl for a projected haul of 2,618 pounds last fiscal year — a more modest 7 percent decline compared to FY 2023.
Why would I have added those facts? Because in remarks at the Southwest border at Douglas, Ariz., in late September, Harris claimed:
I know everyone here understands that most of the fentanyl in America comes from two cartels based in Mexico. Most often, they are smuggling it through vehicles at legal ports of entry, like the one I visited today.
And we will make sure that our ports of entry, including airports and seaports, have additional state-of-the-art technology to detect fentanyl and the chemical tools used to make it.
Channeling my inner Glenn Kessler, I’d opine that any comparison between fentanyl seizures at the ports and seizures by Border Patrol between the ports is “an imperfect metric”. We have no idea where the fentanyl that isn’t seized comes from, but as fentanyl overdose rates show, it’s still coming.
The Biden-Harris administration — and its supporters in the media — have long used that port vs. border distinction to justify the White House’s decision to cancel border wall construction projects that were in the works at the end of the Trump administration. “Better to shift that money to the ports, where the real drug action is,” their arguments usually go.
A little fentanyl goes a long way (2 mg can be a lethal dose), and a courier crossing illegally between the ports can carry a sizeable amount of it a long way into the interior, too. And as I have again long argued, the Biden-Harris border surge has left Border Patrol agents largely unable to stop those smugglers or their drugs.
In any event, Kessler deemed Harris’s fentanyl claims to be “false”, explaining: “We wouldn’t call this merely misspeaking, since she made the same incorrect claim in different interviews conducted days apart”.
There have been whoppers told by both campaigns, particularly as the election draws near, but usually only one side gets fact-checked (and even then, true statements are often deemed false). Kudos to the Washington Post and Glenn Kessler for setting the record straight on the vice president’s claims about two key border issues.
