Speaker Johnson Criticizes Kamala Harris for Border ‘Solutions’

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for suggesting that more resources at the southern border and “a meaningful, meaningful pathway to citizenship” would solve the migrant crisis.

During an interview with CNN’s Laura Coates on Monday, Harris was asked to name solutions to what “they’re calling a crisis,” referring to Republicans.

“The solution includes putting resources at the border to do what we can to process people effectively and putting in place laws that actually allow for a meaningful, meaningful pathway to citizenship,” Harris said.

Johnson ridiculed the response from President Joe Biden’s “border czar.”

“Vice President Harris has had three years to secure the border and stop the open flow of illegal immigrants into our country,” Johnson said in a Tuesday email and in a post on X. “Yet, when asked about her solutions, she recommended that Congress grant mass amnesty and spend taxpayer dollars to process – not stop – more illegals.

“Her ‘solution’ is to spend billions of additional taxpayer dollars and incentivize the lawlessness and chaos.

“This answer from President Biden’s ‘border czar’ is exactly why the administration can’t be trusted to solve the catastrophe they, themselves, created. Their idea is to attract millions more aliens, cause more pain, and further surrender America’s national and economic security.”

Harris’ initial response to Coates asking about the migrant crisis accused Republicans of playing politics and not wanting to seek a bipartisan solution.

“There is no question that our immigration system is broken, and so much so that the first bill we offered after our inauguration was to fix the immigration system, which included we must do to create a pathway for citizenship and to put the resources that are needed into the border,” Harris said.

“But sadly, people on the other side of the aisle have been playing politics with this issue. The solution are at hand. And you know gone are the days of a President [George] Bush or [Arizona Sen.] John McCain understood that we should have a bipartisan approach to fixing this problem, which is a longstanding problem.”

Encounters with illegal immigrants by Customs and Border Protection officials at the U.S.-Mexico border surged to a record in December.

A CBP source told Newsmax earlier this month there were about 302,000 encounters at the southern border in December, surpassing the record for a month of 269,735 in September.

As of Tuesday midday, the CBP website had not been updated with the official monthly encounters total for December.