WASHINGTON -- Vice President Kamala Harris will make her first visit on Friday to the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office, following criticism from members of both parties for failing to go earlier despite her role leading the Biden administration's response to a steep increase in migration.
Harris will visit the El Paso area, accompanied by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, according to a statement Wednesday from Harris senior adviser Symone Sanders.
She was tasked earlier this year by President Joe Biden with taking on the root causes of migration from Central America to the U.S., and so far she's focused largely on outreach to local leaders and advocacy groups with the goal of improving economic and living conditions in the region. Harris has said her goal is to offer residents of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico hope for their future, so they no longer feel compelled to leave home for better opportunities.
Her aides have repeatedly insisted her efforts are distinct from the security issues that plague U.S. officials trying to handle a spike in border crossings. But Republicans have pointed to the failures by both Harris and Biden to visit the border to paint the administration as absent in a crisis.
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Harris will arrive in the area just days before former President Donald Trump is to visit the border with a group of House Republicans and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
The border issue shadowed Harris's first foreign trip earlier this month, to Guatemala and Mexico, where she met with both nations' presidents and local officials to discuss economic and humanitarian solutions to the significant outmigration from both countries.
She has noted that as a senator from California, she has visited the border in the past, and she has asserted that unless the root causes of migration are addressed the situation there will never be fixed.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the trip was "part of the coordinated effort between her office, her work, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, to continue to address the root causes and work in coordination to get the situation under control."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 180,000 encounters on the Mexican border in May, the most since March 2000. Those numbers were boosted by a pandemic-related ban on seeking asylum, which encouraged repeated attempts to cross the border because getting caught carried no legal consequences.
Information for this article was contributed by Jill Colvin of The Associated Press.