Gaslighting the Public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar’

On March 24, 2021, Axios published a story with the headline “Biden Puts Harris in Charge of Border Crisis.”

Politics reporter Stef W. Kight informed us that the vice president would be “addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border” and that Harris would “lead efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) to manage the flow of unaccompanied children and migrant families arriving at the border in numbers not seen since a surge in 2019.”

Lest anyone wonder whether this was a big job with a great deal of responsibility, a White House official told reporters: “President Biden said during the transition, whatever the most urgent need, he would turn to the vice president, and today he is turning to the vice president.”

Today—July 24, 2024—the same reporter at the same outlet has a story headlined “Harris Border Confusion Haunts Her New Campaign.” 

Kight now reports: “In early 2021, President Biden enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris to help with a slice of the migration issue.” (Emphasis mine.)

We are told that there is “confusion around the VP’s exact role” and that “early media misfires and the rapidly changing regional migration crisis has made the issue a top target for the GOP trying to define their new opponent. And it has become even more critical for Harris to find a clear border message, fast.” The story also quotes former Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson: “She is not the border czar.” 

Just to make sure readers understand that Axios, in 2021, in no way intended to provide Republicans, in 2024, with a talking point that might help Donald Trump, Axios has added an editor’s note at the bottom of the new piece: “This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.” 

When I asked Mike Allen, Axios’s executive editor, what had prompted Axios to publish the follow-up article in the first place, he texted me back: “am sure there’ll be continuing conversation on this.” (Allen did not reply to a follow-up question about today’s article and editor’s note.)

There was something just more than a teensy bit Bolshevik about all of this. This piece of information that was once considered a fact—as in, a week ago—has in the past 48 hours been deemed politically unhelpful, and so we’re just going to make it. . . disappear. 

Axios—a credible publication of which I am a dedicated reader—is admitting to an error it never made. In other words, it is sacrificing that hard-earned credibility in the service of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. 

Nor was Axios alone in correcting the record when it came to Harris. 

Time weighed in with its own dispatch (“Kamala Harris Was Never Biden’s ‘Border Czar’ ”), as did USA Today (“Harris’ Border Work Was on ‘Root Causes’ of Migration; She Wasn’t in Charge”), and CBS (“The Facts about Kamala Harris’ Role on Immigration in the Biden Administration”), and The New York Times (“Why Republicans Keep Calling Kamala Harris the ‘Border Czar’” ). 

And on and on.

It should be noted that all this is more than a little ridiculous, since no one in the United States government is technically a czar of anything. How does one “fact-check” that which is only an informal title? 

Nevertheless, it was an informal title widely used. Here’s The New York Times in 2021: “Ms. Harris will also soon be taking over work from a departing official with years of experience. Last week, Roberta S. Jacobson, the former ambassador to Mexico chosen as Mr. Biden’s ‘border czar,’ said that she would retire from government. She said she was happy to see Ms. Harris assume the work of stemming migration from Central America.” And here’s The Washington Post that same year, describing the vice president as taking on “the lead role on the overall border and regional issue.” 

Also worth noting is that all of this “reporting” has taken place without Harris having uttered a single word about her border-related responsibilities. In other words, nothing has actually happened other than Republicans calling Harris what Axios and other media outlets once called Harris. This is, as always, not about providing readers with much-needed news or analysis—but just making sure, in case anyone is worried—that journalists are still doing their all for Team Blue. 

At this stage of things, perhaps it’s not surprising that reporters aren’t scrutinizing Harris’s record with the same zeal with which they dove into “Russiagate,” but this marks a new low. We told you she was this thing that we’re now telling you she never was. What’s the word for that again? Right. Gaslighting.

Missing from this entirely manufactured “confusion” is the critical fact that the United States’ southern border has been a mess for most of Joe Biden’s presidency. For most of the time that the vice president has (or has not) been the “border czar.”

No one is talking about the nearly 250,000 illegal migrants arrested at the border in December 2023—an all-time high. Or the millions who have entered the country since Biden took office. Or the violence. Or the drug cartels. (I reported on the border from Matamoros, Mexico, in April.)

We can be sure of this much: If the border was not a mess, if this was not a winning GOP issue, Kamala Harris would be running on it right now. And her media sock-puppet friends—who seem to believe in nothing except making sure she wins—would be celebrating “The Greatest Border Czar Who Ever Was.”

Peter Savodnik is a senior editor at The Free Press. Read his reporting from the southern border here. 

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