Former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Chief Mark Morgan says Vice President Kamala Harris helped drive a surge of illegal immigration to the United States.

On Friday, Harris and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas — five months into an illegal immigration surge that is expected to bring 1.2 million border crossers to the nation by the end of 2021.

Though Harris has rebranded the influx of illegal immigration as migration chaos that needs only to be managed, Morgan said in a statement that the Vice President and Mayorkas helped create the problem when they gutted former President Trump’s border controls and strict interior immigration enforcement measures.

“Since being appointed to fix Biden’s border crisis, Vice President Harris has done everything she possibly can to distance herself from the crisis, hiding behind terms like ‘root causes’ to escape scrutiny and criticism for her boss’s open-borders agenda,” Morgan, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said:

It’s sad that it took former President Donald Trump’s announcing a visit to the border himself — presenting the Biden administration with an optics nightmare — to finally force Harris to visit the border. [Emphasis added]

Not surprisingly, she’s intentionally staying clear of the Rio Grande Valley area, the current epicenter of the southwest border crisis, where they have experienced more than 270,000 apprehensions this fiscal year. We know this trip is nothing more than a political stunt, rather than a substantive action designed to solicit open and honest feedback from Border Patrol agents who are dealing with the crisis Harris and her chief architect, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have created. [Emphasis added]

Given this week’s shameful ousting of Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, an accomplished 29-year career veteran of the agency, for having the courage to speak his mind and oppose certain radical policies advanced by Biden’s DHS, it’s clear they have no intentions of securing our borders. This visit is an effort to impact optics and get a few good photo-ops, rather than drive any meaningful policies addressing the national security crisis at our border — a crisis jeopardizing every town, city, and state in our great nation. [Emphasis added]

While Mayorkas touted “legal pathways” for border crossers, Americans increasingly want controls on illegal immigration and a heavily regulated asylum system that reduces fraud.

A Harvard/Harris poll released this week found that 67 percent of voters, or more than 2-in-3, said border crossers at the southern border should be returned to Mexico — a policy that President Joe Biden’s administration dismantled and that Harris has ridiculed.

Similarly, the poll showed that 64 percent of voters said Biden ought to “issue new, stricter policies to reduce the flow of people across the border,” the opposite of Harris and Mayorkas’s expansive Catch and Release operation.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here