While Kamala Harris was on a disingenuous photo-op tour of the southern border, surrounded by dozens of bodyguards, wandering in a stretch of desert that had been sanitized for her visit, and oh-so-near the border wall constructed under President Donald Trump, I went to the border of Arizona and Mexico.
What Kamala would have seen had she truly wanted a picture of the crisis that she created and perpetuated as “Border Czar” were the gaps in the border wall that she and her sidekicks—President Joe Biden and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—caused by halting Trump’s border wall program.
Had she joined me at the border, she would have seen that the places most frequently traversed are those very gaps—the places where construction ceased due to her team’s decisions to halt wall construction. I guess she really meant it in 2019 when she decried the construction of a border wall.
The vice president would also have seen three campsites, which appear to be permanent, illegally situated on federal lands. These encampments are meant to be places for illegal aliens to wait to be picked up by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. The migrants will be transported to a facility, processed, and usually released into the interior of America in a matter of a few days, if not in a few hours.
At one of the sites, she would have seen posted instructions from the organizers—American NGOs—for people crossing the border illegally to wait under tarps until the CBP agents come to pick them up. The instructions are to wait, don’t walk, with the promise that agents will come at 8:00 am, 2:00 pm, and 8:00 pm. It’s like a bus stop for illegal aliens to be transported by federal agents into the country.
Our CBP agents who want to enforce the law have been transformed into a logistics arm of the criminal cartels.
Speaking of cartels, had Kamala joined me at the border she would have seen a group of illegal aliens staging on the Mexican side of the border before crossing into the United States. She would have met two teenagers—one 14, the other 17—claiming to be “friends” who were waiting on the Mexican side for a ride to a CBP processing facility.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (L) visits the US-Mexico border with US Border Patrol Tucson Sector Chief John Modlin (C) in Douglas, Arizona, on September 27, 2024.
Rebecca NOBLE / AFP/Getty Images
In our discussions, she would have learned that the 14-year-old boy and his family, who were waiting under the trees and tarps on the Mexican side, were from El Salvador. They were heading to Phoenix to work in either a retail store or restaurant.
The 17-year-old Mexican was not going to be crossing over with the Salvadoran family; he was guiding them. He, as he intimated, was the guide—meaning the “Coyote.” That in turn means he is an employee of a Mexican cartel. In that area of the border, he is probably affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel.
And that means, had Kamala joined me for a real border tour, she would have met a human trafficker face to face. She would have seen that the consequences of her open border policies reach even into the cartels’ use of adolescents as traffickers.
She would also have seen the caravan of NGO vehicles that facilitate the trafficking of drugs and humans who we passed on the border road. One wonders whether our own federal government is providing funding for that particular NGO.
At the end of the big, beautiful wall Trump built, whose construction Harris and her ilk halted, lies a gap that is used by human and drug traffickers.
On the last iron slat of the fence built by Trump is a political sticker—”Trump-Vance.”
If we want border security, we have a clear contrast between the real efforts to control our border undertaken by President Trump, and the disinterested photo opportunist Kamala Harris.
Andy Biggs represents Arizona’s Fifth Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
