Even some Democrats aren’t impressed.
Wednesday’s 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 administration’s immigration policies.
But when veteran Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar appeared on Fox News on Thursday to discuss the trip, it couldn’t have been what President Joe Biden’s White House wanted to hear.
Cuellar, in his 16th year in Congress, represents a district directly affected by Biden’s feckless border policies. He’s also been one of the few members of his party who’s been vocal in urging Harris to visit the region as part of her assignment from Biden to oversee the administration’s response to the border crisis.
While he was glad the vice president is finally getting around to the border, he wasn’t impressed with her plan to visit El Paso on Friday — far from the actual “epicenter” of the problem in the Rio Grande Valley, deep in the south of the Lone Star State.
“If you look at the numbers that are down there compared to El Paso, you are not going to get a true picture of what’s happening,” he said, according to CNS News.
“You 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. That’s how you can get an idea of what’s happening down at the border. So it’s a first step.”
It’s also a “politically safer” first step, Cuellar said.
Texas Democrat Cuellar: Kamala Harris is taking a “politically safe,” “check the box” trip to the border pic.twitter.com/EHoVlhYK5k
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 24, 2021
“I’m sure her planners told her that if you’re going to go down to the border, go to something that’s safer to go to, that is, politically safer,” he said.
“If 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 it’s harder to do that.
“I know that. I mean, that’s part of my district. But you gotta do what you gotta do. You just can’t, you know, just go to one place.”
The Harris trip, he said, would just “check the box.”
Check out more of the Cuellar interview here:
“Check the box” pretty much sums up the degree of seriousness Harris has shown about her border assignment since she got it — the predictably dismal results she’s achieved.
Her ballyhooed trip to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month was a disaster. Even before she arrived, Guatemala’s president openly blamed the immigration policies of the Biden White House for the current crisis.
Her meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López 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 — one who’s intimately aware of the problems plaguing the border since the November election — is deriding the trip as a “check the box” move unlikely to shed much light on the actual issue.
“Yesterday I got a call from one of my Border Patrol friends and say, ‘Hey, why is she going over there? We got about a 140 percent higher crossings over here. This is where the activity’s at,’” Cuellar said on Fox.
“And I couldn’t answer him when he asked me that question.”
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 Trump’s announcement on Wednesday that he was planning his own trip to the border with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the politics of the vice president’s 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.
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That insincerity didn’t impress Democratic voters during the presidential primary campaign — it’s 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, she’s about to make an equally pointless photo-op trip to an area of the southern border that isn’t 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 — but not much else.
If a Democrat who knows the area isn’t impressed, the rest of America shouldn’t be either.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
