Opinion: No border stop is abdication of leadership

Pressed by NBC’s Lester Holt earlier this month about why she hasn’t visited the U.S.-Mexico border to personally witness the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the unforgiving desert, Vice President Kamala Harris tried to make light of a deadly serious situation.

“I haven’t been to Europe. I don’t understand the point you’re making,” Harris quipped, her words falling as flat as a TV sitcom missing its laugh track.

Holt’s question seemed pretty straightforward: Why hasn’t Harris, who was tapped by President Joe Biden in March to lead efforts to stem the crisis on the southern border, yet visited it? Harris recently returned to the U.S. from her first international trip as VP, visiting with leaders in Mexico and Guatemala. She promised Central American countries $4 billion in foreign aid over the coming years (no details on how that money will get to would-be immigrants) and when in Guatemala City told those thinking of making the journey to the United States: “Do not come.”

Then she took her own advice and didn’t make a stop at our nation’s southern border.

Maybe that’s because once there, she might have seen the 14-foot barrier near Santa Teresa, from which two human smugglers callously dropped two young sisters in late March. Border agents rescued the Ecuadorian girls — one 5 years old, the other 3 — after the gangsters completed their end of the bargain and just trotted away.

She might have toured the 35-foot border wall near El Paso, where police said a 24-year-old Mexican national fell to his death June 11 while trying to scale it.

She might have had the opportunity to ask a group of migrants why they left a 20-year-old man behind in Sunland Park. His body was found June 10 outside an elementary school. He had made it a mile into the United States before being abandoned to die of heat-related illness.

With about 900,000 migrants apprehended at our southern border already this year, there’s a lot to see and a lot of people who have a wrenching tale to tell.

Harris and Biden need to see firsthand the horrible mess they’ve both inherited and enhanced. U.S. Customs and Border protection says at least 148 immigrants died along the border between October and the end of April.

With temperatures in Arizona, New Mexico and South Texas routinely in the triple-digits, more people are going to die in the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts if the migrant caravans continue.

The Biden administration abruptly stopped border wall construction and then reversed Trump’s “remain in Mexico” program, so Biden and Harris own the crisis now, with its new flood of immigrants.

The question is: What are they going to do to stop the human trafficking of hundreds of thousands of human beings risking life and limb only to be disappointed, while ensuring a manageable number of immigrants can get safely into the United States to seek a better life?

Harris’ decision not to stop at the nation’s 1,250-mile border on her first foreign trip south was an abdication of leadership.

— Albuquerque Journal