Texas Republicans on Monday attacked Vice President Kamala Harris over her role handling immigration policy for the Biden administration, a potential liability as she emerges as the likely Democratic presidential nominee.
They sought to blame Harris, the leading candidate to replace President Joe Biden after he announced he will refuse the nomination, for a surge in illegal immigration since the pair took office three and a half years ago.
At a news conference in Houston, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said on a scale of 1 to 100, he’d rate Harris’s performance in that role “negative 6,003.”
“She has presided over the worst invasion of the United States of America in the history of our country; 11.5 million people,” Cruz said. “And it’s deliberate. She wanted this to happen. Joe Biden wanted this to happen.”
President Biden in 2021 made Harris the administration’s point person on the root cause of immigration, a broad assignment that tasked the vice president with investigating the factors behind the wave of migration from Mexico and Central American countries. Biden assigned her to focus on Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in particular, since a surge in migrants was coming from that region.
But Cruz and others sought to link Harris to policies governing the U.S.-Mexico border. Cruz said open border policies supported by Biden and Harris are the reason why historically Democratic South Texas is shifting toward the Republican Party.
Cruz blamed these policies for allowing human traffickers to abuse children, rape women and smuggle deadly fentanyl into the United States.
“Kamala Harris has been in charge of it and she deliberately produced this crisis, so sadly if she is president, the only reasonable expectation is this gets worse,” Cruz said.
Joining Cruz in Houston, State Rep. Charles Cunningham, R-Humble, chided Harris for not visiting the border more often and said during his own trips to the Rio Grande he was stunned to see migrants from Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
“I saw several people, looked like they were still in the airport with their luggage, just rolling across,” Cunningham said. “That is all because of the policies we have today with this current administration.”
Harris County Democratic Party Chair Mike Doyle said a lot of conservative attacks on Harris on the issue are disingenuous because Republicans in Congress blocked a bipartisan border security bill the vice president had helped negotiate with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Trump urged Republicans in Congress to block the $118 billion deal, which would have increased spending on border personnel and made it more difficult for migrants to request asylum.
“They’ve lost their right to accuse anybody of anything based on that,” Doyle said. “They really did intentionally sabotage an immigration solution just to fabricate a political issue.”
The first wave of Republican comments as Harris emerged as the leading Democratic contender pointed to an issue that is likely to attract even more attention. Other Republicans were quick to denounce Harris for her work on immigration.
“The ‘border czar’ has been an utter failure,” Gov. Greg Abbott wrote on X, sharing a clip of Harris speaking. “America’s future is bleak if the border czar becomes president.”
Abbott suggested that Texas may need to triple the border wall, razor wire barriers and National Guard on the border.
Should Harris become her party’s nominee, her campaign’s messaging around immigration will be critical. In a University of Houston survey of Texas voters released July 11, 23% of respondents listed immigration and border security as their top issue informing their vote for president, more than any other issue. Of those respondents, 40% were supporters of Donald Trump and 4% backed Biden (the poll was taken before the president dropped out of the race).