Harris cannot ignore the human cost of her disappointing border history

Kamala Harris is spreading false information by claiming, in a new campaign ad and at events, that she will be tough on the border crisis.

“Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris,” a narrator says in her ad on August 7.

She has directly confronted former President Donald Trump on border security.

“I will gladly compare my record to his any day of the week,” she stated at a rally in Atlanta.

“Including, for example, on the issue of immigration.”

So why hasn’t anyone in the media questioned the vice president about her record?

Because Kamala Harris is accountable for our current border crisis.

Two weeks into President Biden’s presidency, he assigned a major duty to his VP: “Leading the Administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”

At that time, news outlets accurately referred to her as the “border czar” responsible for — as Biden articulated — “stemming the migration to our southern border.”

During Harris’ tenure, illegal immigration has drastically increased: Over 10 million inadmissible aliens, along with at least 2 million known “gotaways,” have entered since she and Biden assumed office.

Comparatively, there were around 2 million illegal border crossings throughout the entirety of the Trump administration.

While the numbers are telling, they do not fully depict how the Biden-Harris crisis is negatively impacting communities nationwide, making Americans less secure and financially stable.

For instance, these figures do not demonstrate the hardships that public school teachers in Texas and Arizona will face in the coming school year as they accommodate thousands of unaccompanied minors in their classrooms.

Setting aside the financial burden placed on already financially struggling public school systems by these new students, as well as the potential lack of school choice for students, the true human cost is alarming.

Under Kamala’s oversight of the border, the United States has encountered an astounding 515,000 unaccompanied minors.

These vulnerable children do not speak English and have minimal support systems in place.

According to Biden, 75 to 80% of them are dealing with the trauma of being smuggled into the U.S. by individuals who often engage in physical and sexual abuse.

Additionally, the statistics do not capture the impact on Springfield, Ohio, a small town with around 60,000 inhabitants.

Due to the Harris-Biden border crisis, nearly 20,000 Haitians have relocated to Springfield, leading to a rise in violence and a housing crisis.

Conditions have become dire, prompting city manager Bryan Heck to write a letter to the US Senate seeking federal assistance.

“Bidenomics” has escalated the average sale price of a single-family home in the U.S. to 5.6 times higher than the median household income, up from 4.1 times higher in 2019. The median mortgage payment for Americans is now twice as high as it was in 2021.

If Harris were to win the presidency, we can expect four more years of the same economic policies, along with millions more illegal immigrants, potentially making Springfield’s housing crisis a nationwide disaster.

Furthermore, these statistics do not account for the American lives lost directly due to Kamala’s failures at the border.

Since Biden and Harris took office, deaths related to fentanyl have more than doubled.

Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 49.

Between October 2022 and April 2023, Customs and Border Protection confiscated over 17,000 pounds of fentanyl at the southern border, enough to fatally overdose every American 14 times over.

We must also remember the names of Americans who have been killed by illegal aliens who should never have entered the country: Rachel Morin of Maryland, raped and murdered by an illegal alien from El Salvador; Laken Riley of Georgia, murdered in February by an illegal alien from Venezuela; Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old from Texas raped and strangled by two illegal Venezuelan migrants in June.

The blood of these individuals is on the vice president’s hands.

Extending Harris’s pro-crime policies for four more years will only worsen the situation.

The Democrats will attempt to distance their new nominee from her border track record.

They will minimize her role.

They will falsely claim she did an exceptional job.

And they will try to divert the American people’s attention from their radicalism.

However, these efforts will not succeed.

Kamala Harris’s history speaks for itself.

Americans are aware of this.

And they know that four more years of her harmful agenda will only escalate the ongoing crisis.

Kevin Roberts is president of Heritage Action for America.