Even some Democrats arenât impressed.
Wednesdayâs headlines that Vice President Kamala Harris was finally making a long-neglected trip to the southern border have already been torched by Texas Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn as destined to miss the worst of the disaster area created by the Biden administrationâs immigration policies.
But when veteran Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar appeared on Fox News on Thursday to discuss the trip, it couldnât have been what President Joe Bidenâs White House wanted to hear.
Cuellar, in his 16th year in Congress, represents a district directly affected by Bidenâs feckless border policies. Heâs also been one of the few members of his party whoâs been vocal in urging Harris to visit the region as part of her assignment from Biden to oversee the administrationâs response to the Border crisis.
While he was glad the vice president is finally getting around to the border, he wasnât impressed with her plan to visit El Paso on Friday â far from the actual âepicenterâ of the problem in the Rio Grande Valley, deep in the south of the Lone Star State.
âIf you look at the numbers that are down there compared to El Paso, you are not going to get a true picture of whatâs happening,â he said, according to CNS News.
âYou go to the Donna facility, you go to Roma, Texas, you go to Rio Grande City, you go to the McAllen area so you can get an idea. Thatâs how you can get an idea of whatâs happening down at the border. So itâs a first step.â
Itâs also a âpolitically saferâ first step, Cuellar said.
âIâm sure her planners told her that if youâre going to go down to the border, go to something thatâs safer to go to, that is, politically safer,â he said.
âIf you go down to the lower Rio Grande with the high activity and you are there with kids and families, prosecutorial discretion where people are being released, high numbers of people crossing the border, you know, politically itâs harder to do that.
âI know that. I mean, thatâs part of my district. But you gotta do what you gotta do. You just canât, you know, just go to one place.â
The Harris trip, he said, would just âcheck the box.â
Check out more of the Cuellar interview here:
đş Embedded media â coming soon
âCheck the boxâ pretty much sums up the degree of seriousness Harris has shown about her border assignment since she got it â the predictably dismal results sheâs achieved.
Her ballyhooed trip to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month was a disaster. Even before she arrived, Guatemalaâs president openly blamed the immigration policies of the Biden White House for the current crisis.
Her meeting with Mexican President AndrĂŠs Manuel LĂłpez Obrador produced some feel-good public statements, as the New York Post reported, but as far as substantive results: Nada.
The lapdogs at CNN even had trouble putting a positive spin on the junket.
And now a member of her own party â one whoâs intimately aware of the problems plaguing the border since the November election â is deriding the trip as a âcheck the boxâ move unlikely to shed much light on the actual issue.
âYesterday I got a call from one of my Border Patrol friends and say, âHey, why is she going over there? We got about a 140 percent higher crossings over here. This is where the activityâs at,ââ Cuellar said on Fox.
âAnd I couldnât answer him when he asked me that question.â
He actually did answer it. Harris is going to the border because she has to.
After three months of steadily building pressure for her cavalier treatment of the problem, and former President Donald Trumpâs announcement on Wednesday that he was planning his own trip to the border with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Politics of the vice presidentâs evident disengagement from a national disaster were becoming untenable.
The problem for Harris and her boss, however, is that the move is as transparently insincere as everything else about her.
That insincerity didnât impress Democratic voters during the presidential primary campaign â itâs why she had to quit in December 2019, before even a single vote was cast. Her place on the Democratic presidential ticket was due solely to her race and her sex, a fact known to literally everyone who follows American Politics, regardless of party.
After a result-free trip to Guatemala and Mexico, sheâs about to make an equally pointless photo-op trip to an area of the southern border that isnât even the hardest-hit region of the illegal immigration crisis.
Expect the establishment media propaganda machine to do its best to pump up the visit as a bold stride toward solving an intractable problem â but not much else.
If a Democrat who knows the area isnât impressed, the rest of America shouldnât be either.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.