Pro-Harris media scrambles to erase ‘Border Czar’ from her resume as GOP highlights her record
Rewriting History: Harris received the appointment from the White House in early 2021, at which time media outlets often referred to her as the “border czar.”
With Vice President Kamala Harris poised to become the Democratic standard bearer, the media has rushed to flush her title of “border czar” down a memory hole, a role upon which Republicans have seized to launch a volley of attacks on her record.
Unrelated to the Bulgarian or Russian monarchies, the title of “czar” refers to an administration’s policy lead on a specific issue. It is not an official title, but often serves as a shorthand for an established, or temporarily created, executive branch position.
Harris received the appointment from the White House in early 2021, at which time media outlets did refer to her as the “border czar.” The exact parameters of her role were somewhat unclear, however, and Harris’s then-chief spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, insisted at the time that Harris was “not doing the border” and would “take on the diplomatic effort, with Mexico and countries in the northern triangle to address the root causes of migration.”
Despite “not doing the border,” Harris ultimately visited the border city of El Paso, Texas, in June 2021 and toured a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) migrant processing center. During that visit, moreover, Harris herself linked her efforts with the situation at the southern border, saying “[m]y trip to Guatemala and Mexico was about addressing the root causes… So the work that we have to do is the work of addressing the cause, the root causes. Otherwise, we will continue to see the effect of what is happening at the border.”