US President Joe Biden has put Vice-President Kamala Harris in complete charge of controlling migration at the southern border following a big influx of new arrivals.
President Biden while admitting that he understood how tough the job was however noted that she was ‘the most qualified person to do it’.
The numbers of people arriving have grown since Mr. Biden took office following the relaxation of most of Trump’s bans which made migration at the borders quite difficult.
In February, US Customs officials took more than 100,000 people into custody along the southern border, a 28% increase on the previous month.
Announcing Ms. Harris’s appointment as his immigration czar, Mr. Biden told reporters and officials at the White House: ‘She’s the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle [Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador], and the countries that are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks – stemming the migration to our southern border’.
Mr. Biden said Ms. Harris’s past work as California’s attorney general made her well suited to leading the effort, adding: “When she speaks, she speaks for me.”
In her response, Ms. Harris said: ‘Needless to say, the work will not be easy. But it is an important job.’
In an interview with CBS on Wednesday, Ms. Harris said there was a need ‘to deal with the root causes… of what’s happening in the Northern Triangle’.
‘Dealing with what we need to do around aid in a way that is about developing those countries so that we also deal with the cause of why people are coming into our country,’ she said.
By putting her in charge of addressing the growing humanitarian crisis on the US-Mexico border, Biden has given Harris a significant portfolio laced with both political opportunity and peril. Her challenge is to prove that there is a way to stem the tide of undocumented migrants coming to the US from Central America without resorting to what Democrats characterise as the Trump administration’s draconian policies.
If she succeeds, Harris defuses an issue that the Republican Party – and Donald Trump, in particular – has used as an effective political weapon against her party, earning the gratitude of influential immigration activists. If she fails, the ensuing political fallout could derail the Biden presidency and overshadow all its early accomplishments.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
