Vice President Kamala Harris never spoke to either chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under the Biden administration, despite the former California senator’s appointment as the White House “border czar” three years ago.
On Monday, NewsNation correspondent Ali Bradley wrote on X that Harris, who launched her bid for her party’s presidential nomination Sunday, has yet to speak with Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens, “who has been in the position for the last year.”
Owens’ predecessor, Raul Ortiz, who led the law enforcement agency from 2021 to 2023, told CBS in March that he “never had one conversation with the president or the vice president” during his tenure.
“I was the chief of the Border Patrol; I commanded 21,000 people. That’s a problem,” Ortiz said on “60 Minutes.”
Harris was tasked with handling the administration’s response to the southern border crisis re-ignited by President Joe Biden’s election in 2020. In March, Ortiz said that Biden was “most definitely” sending “mixed messages” to migrants who plan to cross the border.
Owens also told CBS News in a March interview the situation at the southern border has deteriorated into a “national security threat.”
“What’s keeping me up at night is the 140,000 known got-aways,” Owens said, in reference to migrants who’ve crossed the border but evaded capture by law enforcement over the 2024 fiscal year. “If we don’t know who is coming into our country, and we don’t know what their intent is, that is a threat and they’re exploiting a vulnerability that’s on our border right now.”
[RELATED: 65 Times Biden Gutted Border Security Since Taking The White House]
More than 1.7 million “known got-aways” have illegally crossed the border since Biden took office, which “is higher than the 1.4 million recorded in the entire decade from 2010 to 2020,” the New York Post reported in May. When asked on the presidential debate stage in 2019 whether she believed lawmakers should decriminalize illegal border crossings, then-Sen. Harris raised her hand in the affirmative.
As vice president overseeing the disaster on the border, Harris participated in the administration’s peddling of the hoax wherein federal agents were accused of “whipping” Haitian migrants who crossed the border in 2021. Viral images of agents using horse reigns as a common crowd control measure to protect the horses and the bystanders were misinterpreted by Democrats and the corporate press as “whips” being used to beat migrants.
“What I saw depicted about those individuals on horseback, treating human beings the way they were, is horrible. And I fully support what is happening right now, which is a thorough investigation into exactly what is going on there,” Harris said when the images surfaced. “But human beings should never be treated that way and I am deeply troubled by it.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who survived congressional impeachment proceedings this spring, said in 2021 “those images painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation’s ongoing battle against systemic racism.”
The photographer who took the photo, however, had explained prior to Mayorkas taking the White House podium that no whips were used.
“I’ve never seen them whip anyone,” Paul Ratje told KTSM. “He was swinging it, but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
When pressed on the photographer’s contradictory testimony, Mayorkas dismissed the clarification.
“The horses have long reins, and the image in the photograph that we all saw, and that horrified the nation, raised serious questions about what … occurred, and as I stated quite clearly, it conjured up images of what has occurred in the past,” Mayorkas said.
Emails revealed by the Heritage Foundation through the Freedom of Information Act in October 2022, however, show Mayorkas knew the whipping debacle was another episode of fake news peddled by the Democrat elite before he defended the controversy against the agents accused.
Mayorkas went on to correct a reporter last December more than a year after peddling the hoax himself wherein the DHS secretary clarified from the White House press podium an “investigation concluded that the whipping did not occur.”
The New York Post reported in May that one agent falsely accused of whipping migrants by the president himself was recognized with the Border Patrol Achievement Award for his intelligence work on human smuggling.
Vice President Harris, however, never apologized for participating in the smear campaign against border agents by comparing the incident to “slavery.”
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