Harris: We’ll Do Everything to Manage ‘What Might Be an Influx’ at Border

During a portion of an interview with NPR aired on Monday’s “All Things Considered” that took place before the Supreme Court put a temporary hold on the scheduled end of Title 42, Vice President Kamala Harris stated that the Biden administration will do everything they can to handle the situation on the border, including placing “more agents on the border as appropriate so that we can manage what might be an influx.”

NPR White House Correspondent Asma Khalid asked, “I’m curious if there’s anything you feel that you all can do unilaterally, and I guess I say this in part because the governor of your home state of California, he told ABC News that ‘what we’ve got right now [is not] working.’ … He said that ‘it’s about to break in a post-42 world unless we take [some] responsibility and ownership.’ And it sounds like the situation in certain states — I guess in California in particular — is incredibly dire with a fear that things will become unsustainable in the weeks ahead.”

Harris responded, “Well, listen, I think that it is right to say that we need leadership on this issue, in particular from Congress. Now, the president and I and our administration, we are going to do everything that’s within our ability as the executive branch, and that means, again, putting more agents on the border as appropriate so that we can manage what might be an influx. It is about increasing the work that we have been increasing around arresting human smugglers. And it is the work that we have been doing that has been about bringing the partners and the allies together on an international level, understanding that we are seeing these migration trends around the globe. And in particular, the work that we have done that has been about addressing the root causes of migration from, for example, the northern part of Central America, actually is having an impact.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett