Sending Troops to Border Is ‘Inappropriate’ and ‘Political,’ Said Veep Whose Boss Is Now Sending Troops to Border

Vice President Kamala Harris in a 2018 interview blasted the Trump administration’s decision to send troops to the border as “political” and “inappropriate,” remarks that may hurt her after news broke Tuesday that the Biden administration is sending 1,500 troops to the border.

“The administration made a decision to deploy [troops] based on a political agenda,” then-senator Harris said, “and I believe that it is inappropriate to require the limited resources of the United States military to be used in such a way.” She described the Trump administration’s decision as “some demonstration for the TV cameras based on a political agenda instead of what is a national security threat.”

Harris has not used similar language to describe the Biden administration’s decision to deploy troops to the border. According to a Homeland Security Department memo, the Pentagon will send staff to manage an enormous expected surge on the southern border following the repeal of Title 42, a Trump administration border security measure, the Washington Free Beacon reported Tuesday. Defense Department officials confirmed the same day that the administration will send “1,500 active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in anticipation of an influx of migrants,” according to CNN.

“The active-duty Army units will assist Border Patrol and will be armed,” National Review reported. In addition to the Army, 2,500 active-duty National Guardsmen are already stationed at the border.

The Border Patrol, which last year faced a record-high number of encounters with illegal immigrants, may now have to deal with up to 15,000 migrants per day. By comparison, the whole month of March 2022 “saw an average of roughly 5,200 daily illegal border crossings,” the Free Beacon reported. An unprecedented 5.5 million immigrants have already illegally crossed the border since Harris’s boss, President Joe Biden, took office.

Harris, who is ostensibly in charge of managing the administration’s response to the crisis, has only been to the border once, in June 2021. In January of this year, she visited the border state of Arizona but didn’t discuss the crisis. Instead, she talked about green energy projects.

Even as the crisis worsens by the day, Biden administration officials, including Harris, have insisted that the border is secure. One day before the Pentagon confirmed the troop movement, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre falsely claimed that “illegal migration” has “come down by more than 90 percent.”