Fox News is criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for her presence and rhetoric at a Georgia fundraiser last week, just a few hours after Title 42 expired.
“Harris gave remarks at the Democratic Party of Georgia’s spring soiree in Buckhead,” Fox reported, “but did not mention immigration during her speech that appeared to last about 20 minutes. The event came as thousands of migrants flooded the border after the expiration of Title 42 – a COVID-19 emergency policy that allowed border agents to turn away migrants.”
The Republican Party of Georgia got in on the criticism, too, saying that it was “deplorable that the Vice President is coming to Atlanta for a fundraiser campaigning while the border crisis is overflowing and we have out-of-control inflation.”
Well, if the standard were to be to suspend campaigning while the border crisis was peaking while inflation was up, no one would ever be able to campaign, would they?
Now, I’ve written several articles criticizing Harris – for her campaigning ability, for her tendencies as a prosecutor, for the nature of her selection as vice president, for the way she allegedly treats her staff. But I’m not too worried about her participation in last week’s Georgia fundraiser; most of the criticism is just political pettiness.
Republicans criticizing Harris
Kelly Loeffler, a former Republican Senator from Georgia, ripped into Harris, too, with this tweet: “Kamala ‘Border Czar’ Harris isn’t at the border today. She’s in Atlanta fundraising for Georgia Democrats ahead of her 2024 run on the Biden/Harris ticket. Collecting checks and congrats from liberal elites while border communities descend into chaos is not leadership.”
Sean Spicer, the former Trump press secretary who is perhaps best remembered for insisting that more people attended Trump’s inauguration than Obama’s, also tweeted about Harris’s visit: “As thousands of people flood our southern border and illegally enter the country the border czar Kamala Harris in Georgia at a DNC fundraiser.”
Other Twitter users piled on. “The day Title 42 expires, Kamala Harris is…fundraising for Democrats,” one user said. Another added “Seems like a natural place for the border czar at a time of crisis.”
You get the idea. Republicans think Harris should be down at the border or something, physically rounding up migrants, I don’t know.
Conservatives upset that Title 42 expiring
Prompting all the criticism of course is the expiration of Title 42, which allowed “for the rapid expulsion of asylum seekers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Title 42, which Trump implemented – and Biden kept in place – was used to expel nearly 3 million migrants since March 2020. Now, the end of Title 42 is prompting fears that migrants will surge to the U.S.-Mexico border, in hopes of entering the U.S. Border Patrol is expecting 10,000 migrants a day once U.S. asylum law, following the expiration of Title 42, becomes more lenient. Biden himself acknowledged that the border was “going to be chaotic for a while.”
Yet, to mitigate the flow of migrants and asylum seekers, Biden implemented a new rule similar to an old Trump rule that “would block migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. if they passed through another country along the way that also offers asylum.”
So, someone migrating from, say, El Salvador to the U.S. would, under the new rule, be required to apply for asylum in Mexico – which is extremely difficult.
And that’s what’s so odd about conservatives criticizing Harris and Biden? And what’s so odd about Democrats criticizing Trump? On the border; the Trump and Biden administrations have had very similar approaches to the border crisis – which makes the cross-party criticism all the more petty.
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Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
