Is Kamala Harris a ‘failed border czar’?

Czar or otherwise, the job was a daunting, thankless task.

Successfully dealing with decades of underinvestment and the region’s deep-seated economic and political strife would require huge amounts of money, along with goodwill and cross-party cooperation. That’s in woefully short supply in Washington, especially when it comes to immigration.

“The idea that any one US administration is going to alter 500 years of history in Central America in a four-year period is ludicrous,” says Ricardo Zúniga.

As the former lead US diplomat on the Northern Triangle, he maintains the Biden administration did make in-roads to Central America’s problems.

He points to Ms Harris’s help raising $5bn (£3.9bn) from the private sector for job creation and entrepreneurship in the region. Several former members of her team recount how she personally called CEOs, persuading them to put in funds.

During her visit to Guatemala and Mexico in June 2021, I saw Ms Harris try to show a kinder face, following four years of Donald Trump’s harsh rhetoric. She said she appreciated that people were fleeing “hunger, hurricanes and pandemic” and went on to set up a Central American corruption task force.

That trip, though, is most remembered for her stark message to all prospective migrants: “Do not come. If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”

Millions ignored her warning. Roughly two years later, in December 2023, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers had 300,000 encounters with undocumented immigrants at the US southern border.

Many who have governed along the border in recent years take a dim view of Kamala Harris and her work in Central America.

“Whatever she was doing diplomatically in other countries, I wouldn’t call it very effective based on what we saw here at the actual border,” says Douglas Nicholls, the Republican Mayor of Yuma, Arizona.

“We had record numbers of people, numbers that far exceeded anything we’d ever seen before, including over three times the population of my city in one year. Those were scary numbers.”

The vice-president is a “legitimate” target on the issue, which he says is not “a made-up excuse to whip up support among the base.”

“It should have been addressed a lot earlier than it was,” says Mayor Nicholls.

Others suggest the funds Ms Harris helped raise had only a small impact on the major incentive driving people north – being paid in US dollars.

Ricardo Barrientos, the director of the Central American Institute of Fiscal Studies, said US private-sector investment paled in comparison to the remittances Central American migrants send home: $37 bn last year alone.

“It’s very small compared to the magnitude of the challenge. Some would say, ‘too little, too late’,” he said.

But Katie Tobin, who worked on immigration at the White House, says Ms Harris’s work has been deliberately “misconstrued and painted in a bad light“.

Ms Harris deserves credit for “a good news story” in Central America, she says. She points to statistics showing a 72% drop in immigration from just Central America between March 2021, when Ms Harris took on the role, and June 2024.