OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff appeared to try and distance his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, from President Joe Biden’s policies during a softball interview on Friday with “Good Morning America” co-host and former NFL star Michael Strahan.
The perennial pro-bowler, who interviewed Emhoff at a diner in the second gentleman’s hometown of Matawan, N.J., essentially asked whether a Harris administration would differ from the current administration, even though shortly after both took office, the White House announced that it would officially be known as the “Biden-Harris administration.”
“So, for those who may criticize [Harris] and say, ‘Well, she hasn’t done that [in] her three-and-a-half years in office as vice president.’ Do you think that’s unfair?” Strahan asked.
“Yeah, she’s the vice president, not the president,” Emhoff responded. “The vice president is there as part of the administration, not leading the administration. So, as president, she’s gonna be able to put forth her policies and plans and effectuate those.”
Strahan moved on from that point, however, and did not press Emhoff on how Harris’ policies would differ, which specific policies she would continue to embrace or change, and how she would try to implement them.
Indeed, the vice president has claimed during interviews that she was “the last person in the room” with Biden when the decision was made to hastily withdraw from Afghanistan — a decision that led to a chaotic situation with 13 U.S. service members being killed by a suicide bomber along with roughly 150 Afghans at the international airport in Kabul just days before the last American flight out.
Also, Biden appointed Harris “border czar” within a few months of taking office, and during her tenure, illegal immigration and the importation of fentanyl have both skyrocketed to historic numbers. To the latter, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that for the 12-month period ending June 2023, 112,323 American lives were lost to illegal drug overdoses, 70 percent of which were caused by fentanyl — also a record.
Retired San Diego Border Patrol Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke revealed during a congressional hearing last week that he was directed by the Biden-Harris administration not to disclose arrests of illegal border crossers identified as “Significant Interest Aliens” who have ties to terrorism.
Heitke testified before a U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Wednesday about how the Biden-Harris “open border policies have undermined our safety and security.”
“The only true consequence we have to slow down and discourage people from coming into the United States illegally is sending them back to their country of origin. Throughout the first three-plus years of this administration, I saw a steady decrease in the countries we could send people back to for the first time in my 25 years, and under five different administrations, whether through neglect or on purpose, I saw a large-scale lapse in our ability to return people to their country of origin,” Heitke testified.
“The inability to send people home meant that most people being arrested for illegal entry would either have to be detained or released. The current administration, however, from day one made a point of decreasing the amount of detention space available nationwide. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s funding for detention has steadily been cut, and private detention eliminated,” he added.
“The fact that so many illegal aliens are being released into the United States spread worldwide very quickly. As this happened, the numbers of the Border Patrol encountered illegally crossing the border increased exponentially. The impact to me and my agents were significant. Sectors were ordered to take in and process all the illegal aliens encountered on the border,” the former chief testified.
“We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time throughout 2022 and 23,” he continued. “I sent agents to Texas and Arizona to count gotaways. Those sectors could not even put enough agents in the field to see what they had missed. Simultaneously, in San Diego, we had an exponential increase in significant interest aliens.”
Before the Biden-Harris administration, the sector averaged 10 to 15 SIAs per year, the Center Square reported.
