WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris will visit Atlanta on Friday for a Democratic Party “spring soiree” — instead of visiting the US-Mexico border in her role as migration czar as thousands of people illegally enter America after the lifting of the Title 42 COVID-19 expulsion policy.
Harris will depart Washington around noon and appear mid-afternoon at a Democratic National Committee finance event before being the guest of honor at the Democratic Party of Georgia’s Spring Soiree.
The optics of Harris attending political events instead of attending to the border crisis drew fresh condemnation from Republicans, who have accused her of not doing enough on border issues since President Biden tapped her in March 2021 to lead US efforts to reduce illegal immigration.
“Title 42 ended last night at midnight. Since then, absolute chaos has erupted at the southern border,” tweeted Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.). “Yet Joe Biden and Border Czar Kamala Harris are nowhere to be found.”
The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment, including on what she plans to do in the coming days to address the rush to the border — with a Homeland Security intelligence analysis reported by the New York Times saying 660,000 migrants from around the world may be waiting in Mexico to cross into the US.
The Biden administration says that illegal border crossers will be presumed ineligible for asylum and expelled after Title 42 expired at 11:59 p.m. Thursday — reflecting a tougher policy than during Biden’s first two years in office.
However, the administration also planned to temporarily release migrants into the US if detention capacity runs out — an idea blocked Thursday by a federal judge in Florida.
Two former White House officials told Reuters in March that Biden was frustrated with Harris’ performance, including her aversion to risky assignments and failure to rise “to the occasion.”
Harris took heat throughout her vice presidency for appearing reluctant to embrace her assignment to reduce illegal immigration by addressing the “root causes” in other countries.
Title 42 is a federal health measure enforced by the US Border Patrol. It allows the agency to kick certain migrants out of the US and return them to Mexico. This includes asylum seekers, who under international law have the legal right to make an asylum claim in America.
Currently, migrants who cross the border illegally and who are from Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua or Venezuela are subject to Title 42 and could be sent to Mexico.
President Donald Trump invoked the law in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue the policy. The Trump administration made the case that keeping migrants out of the country would slow down the spread of infections and maintain the safety of federal agents encountering migrants.
When President Biden took over, he continued to enforce Title 42 with one important change from his predecessor. Biden said Border Patrol agents were only allowed to expel migrants from certain countries under his direction. That meant migrants seeking asylum from countries like Cuba and Venezuela could still seek asylum if they arrived at the border and stay in the US while their cases were decided in court — unless they had a criminal record.
Title 42 is supposed to be a health policy, not an immigration law. It will end at 11:59 p.m. May 11, when the Biden administration ends all COVID-19-related policies.
Many have called for the policy’s end, saying it’s illegal and that international law guarantees people the right to seek asylum.
Others, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, warn that the southern border could see up to 13,000 migrants per day crossing with the intention to stay in the country when the measure ends.
It’s unclear exactly how many people have been expelled under Title 42 because there have been scores of people who have attempted to enter the country numerous times and been rejected again and again, but the US Border Patrol said it made an all-time high of more than 2.3 million arrests at the border in the last fiscal year. Forty percent of people who were expelled from the country were ejected under the rules of Title 42.
Her defenders, however, note the veep organized pledges of corporate investment in Central America as well as the fact that the number of migrants from the so-called Northern Triangle three-country region (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) has dropped.
Harris traveled in June 2021 to Guatemala and Mexico, but the mission was overshadowed by her struggle to explain her reluctance to visit the US-Mexico border.
The VP ultimately did visit El Paso weeks later, but only after former President Donald Trump booked a visit to the border region first.
There were nearly 2.4 million arrests for illegally crossing the US-Mexico border in fiscal 2022, which ended Sept. 30 — up from an elevated 1.7 million in fiscal 2021, fewer than 500,000 in fiscal 2020, and nearly 1 million in fiscal 2019.
Those figures do not include migrants who evaded arrest, known in Border Patrol parlance as “gotaways.”