LETTER: County commissioners need to stop lying about Harris being ‘Border Czar’

The Livingston County Board of Commissioners has decided in a Resolution, to choose to repeat a longstanding lie, by referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “Border Czar.”

Candidate Donald J. Trump called her that in an ad, after she was appointed by President Joe Biden to go on a diplomatic mission called the Roots Causes Strategy. Her assignment was meeting with delegates from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras for the purpose of determining the reasons that individuals and families were leaving their countries of origin (1).

“She was given a very hard, difficult, convoluted portfolio,” said U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and an architect of a bipartisan border security bill introduced earlier this year (2).”

She was asked to get an idea of what the poverty levels were and how that could be improved in the regions of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, what is referred to as the Northern Triangle. She consulted frequently with Mexico during this time.

She also had to look at what was driving the violence and the corruption in those countries. These factors were making the security of the lives of those individuals so untenable for them to be able to remain there. Making the decision to leave their homes and everything they owned, to face and undertake the horrific actuality of doing so, was most difficult.

These individuals and families knew the journey would be very hard, but they could hardly imagine what they would encounter along the way. Violence from marauding bandits, weather conditions, hostilities from locals, not to mention what they faced at our southern border. Razor wire barriers in Texas drowning women, children, and infants. Being turned away, being asked to remain in Mexico.

When they were finally allowed through, they faced internment camps. At least under the Biden/Harris administration their infants and children were not ripped from their arms and placed in separate quarters where the older children, traumatized though they were, had to take care of the little ones, who were likewise horrendously traumatized, which occurred under the Trump/Pence administration. And their infants and toddlers weren’t farmed out to places all over the nation, lost in the system, to this date, not being returned to their families.

“The White House said in March that Harris helped engineer $4 billion in government aid and commitments of $5.2 billion in private investment to create or support an estimated 250,000 jobs in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador (3) .”

Before she had even completed the objectives of this diplomatic mission, things at the border were changing. The problems at the southern border were “illegal immigration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela (4).”

This is a very long way of explaining that her diplomatic mission was very complex, very difficult, and arduous. She did have some important successes on this mission. But to reiterate, NO, she was never designated as the Border Czar.

That was something derogatory that TRUMP called her in a couple of his ads back when this diplomatic mission was happening in 2021-2022. He is now using that term again during his candidacy. It is repulsive, offensive and disrespectful. This is NOT how the Vice President of the United States, nor the candidate for the Presidency, should be addressed. Whether by candidate Trump, or by the Livingston County Board of Commissioners. STOP IT.

Peggy L. Van Sickle
Brighton