Vice President Kamala Harris Harris talks to the media on arrival to El Paso, Texas.Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Even before President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the race on Sunday afternoon, Republicans already had a line of attack prepared against the likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris: “Border czar.”

As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.

Harris was never appointed the “czar” of “the border.” Nor is she in charge of it. That is to a large extent the purview of the secretary of homeland security, which of course Republicans know all too well. They tried and failed to impeach Biden’s head of DHS Alejandro Mayorkas on baseless allegations that he deliberately enabled “open borders.”

That didn’t make much difference last week. As many as seven speakers at the Republican National Convention referred to Harris as “border czar.” Defeated GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley exemplified the critique: “Kamala had one job. One job. And that was to fix the border. Now imagine her in charge of the entire country.”

Glad we're seeing more media pushback on the idea that Harris was ever "border czar." It simply was not true, as beat reporters at the time knew but White House reporters often got badly wrong. https://t.co/ONxn2rLZa5

On Sunday, Donald Trump echoed the sentiment. “She was in charge of the border,” he told CBS News. “She was the border czar, she was the worst ever. The worst ever. We had the worst border ever so that wouldn’t matter.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described........

© Mother Jones