In all likelihood, former Vice President Kamala Harris is done with electoral politics. Her brand is too damaged. She is too closely associated with the chaos and dysfunction of the Biden presidency. And she still has never won an election outside of a deep blue state. Even in her own home state of California, Democrats prefer not only Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) over her, but former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as well.
That said, Harris is still a Democrat in good standing, and while she may not be a future leader of the party, her approach to issues reflects how the party broadly engages with them.
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MEASURING TRUMP’S DEPORTATION SUCCESS
In her new book, 107 Days, Harris frames her role in immigration policy as part of a broader narrative that attributes her election loss to President Joe Biden and his team rather than herself.
To be fair, Harris correctly points out that she was never made “border czar” as many have claimed. She was instead tasked with a much smaller portfolio of addressing the “root causes” of migration in the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Harris claims she was right for the task since she had “ideas about the kinds of investments and other interventions that over time would reduce irregular migration, help to bring stability, and offer people a safer future in their own community.”
“Most people don’t want to leave home,” Harris writes, echoing a phrase President Joe Biden himself often repeated when talking about border security. “And when they do [leave], it is usually for one of two reasons: they fear for their lives, or they can’t make a living,” Harris continues. “Much of that region is rural, and farmers are increasingly hit by climate events such as floods and droughts. If you can no longer grow food where you are, and if there’s no other livelihood, you will leave, because there’s simply no choice. Corruption and gangs thrive when there are limited resources.”
This was not just Harris’s view of the border crisis. This is exactly what Biden himself said and it is what all of the major left of center think tanks said as well. If we could just get the economies of Central America on track, and reduce crime and corruption, then migrants would stop coming from these countries.
To this end, Harris claims she personally secured “$5.2 billion in new investments by private companies for the region” and “held numerous bilateral meetings with leaders throughout the region” including President Alejandro Giammattei in Guatemala and Andres Manuel López Obrador in Mexico.
“In the locations where I was able to bring new enterprises and greater stability,” Harris claims, “data showed it was working. Our investments had created 70,000 new jobs, reached more than a million people with training programs, and connected 2.5 million previously unbanked people with banking services and access to credit. These people were staying put.”
Turning back to the purpose of her story, Harris then takes a dig at Biden, “I wanted to get that good news out. But White House staff stalled. ‘Not yet. We need more data.’ The story remained untold,” Harris writes.
Apparently she wants us to believe that if only the Biden White House had put out more press releases celebrating all the investments Harris “secured” in Central America, then voters would have ignored all the deprivation and chaos Biden’s border crisis had created in their communities.
But does the “data” show that all the private sector commitments “secured” by Harris stopped the flow of migrants from Central America? Not at all.
Harris first announced $1.2 billion in investments for Central America in December 2021 followed by another $3 billion by February 2023 for a total of $4.2 billion, including a $300 million investment from Target. Meanwhile, while all this Harris directed investment was pouring into Central America, migration out was still rising. When Harris was first tasked with addressing the “root causes of migration from Central America” in May 2021 just 22,630 migrants from those countries were caught illegally crossing the southern border from those countries. By June 2022, that number had risen to 57,948 and by August of 2023 it had ballooned to 79,185.
Now it is true that illegal immigration did start falling during the Biden administration before Trump was sworn into office for his second term. But again the reason Biden and Harris both claim illegal immigration fell is complete fiction. Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party want everyone to believe that immigration started falling in June 2024, after Biden issued an executive order requiring migrants to affirmatively claim fear of being returned to their home country, instead of Border Patrol agents just assuming everyone who was arrested wanted to claim asylum.
And illegal border crossings from all countries did fall from 130,415 in June 2024 to 96,308 the last month of Biden’s presidency (since Trump took office they have fallen to a historic low of 7,832, a subject we will return to later). But the decline in border crossings during the Biden presidency did not start in June. It started six months earlier in December 2023 when a record high 301,981 illegal immigrants were encountered at the southern border.
So what happened in December 2023 that suddenly turned illegal immigration around? Maybe that $300 million check Harris got from Target finally cleared? No. What happened was that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, not Harris, met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and made a secret deal.
Obrador agreed to have Mexican law enforcement officials begin detaining migrants in cities close to the U.S. border, forcing them onto buses, and then sending those buses far south back into Mexico. In exchange, Biden would support Obrador’s chosen successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, and would not announce his new executive order on immigration until after Sheinbaum had been safely elected, which is exactly what happened.
Mexican police began rounding up migrants, putting them on buses, which then rolled into towns like Villahermosa which is 1,000 miles away from the United States border. As a direct result of these enforcement policies, illegal border crossings plummetted.
“I shouldered the blame for the porous border,” Harris whines in her book, “an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike… It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time.”
Except Trump’s second term in office has exposed this argument to be completely false as well. The border is not an “intractable” issue. It did not require “bipartisan cooperation.” Trump solved it completely by himself. As mentioned above, when Trump first came into office, almost 100,000 illegal immigrants were still crossing the border every month. That number has since fallen to just 7,832. With numbers that small, the federal government no longer has to release migrants into the United States due to limited detention capacity. Since May of 2025, zero illegal immigrants have been released into the United States, a number not achieved in over a decade.
Trump solved the border crisis. Completely. Without any new laws and without any help from Congress. All he had to do was enforce existing immigration law (and maybe use tariffs as leverage to force Mexico to take more migrants back into their country).
Now Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed without any Democratic Party support this July, does help provide resources for future immigration enforcement, including $45 billion for new detention facilities and $10 billion to hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. These investments will make it easier for Trump to continue keeping the border secure. But the fact remains he was able to secure the border without these resources months before they were allocated by statute.
In a sense, all of this is water under the bridge. Biden, Harris, and the Democratic party were epically wrong about the cause of and solution to the border crises Biden created. But the past does matter. Democrats are going to run a presidential campaign again in 2028. They are going to claim they have learned from Biden’s immigration failures. Harris’s book shows they have made no progress.
When 2027 rolls around and Democrats start running for president, they must be pressed on their immigration views: Will you dismantle Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement policies? Will you apply the necessary pressure to Mexico to keep the border secure? Do you have the political will necessary to turn migrants away at the southern border even if they say the word “asylum”?
Biden oversaw a historic wave of illegal immigration that caused tremendous strain on communities across the country. Voters everywhere learned that when the border isn’t secure, every community is a border community. Unless voters want that tragedy to unfold again, the next Democratic presidential candidate must show he or she understands what is necessary to secure the southern border.