Following President Joe Biden dropping from the race, Vice President Kamala Harris will likely be the Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential race. Now, several news outlets are backtracking on some previous reports on Harris — especially ones calling her the “border czar.”
The title was given to Harris by Republicans and the media. This came out shortly after President Biden appointed Harris to work with Mexican and Central American leaders to find the root causes of migration from the southern border into the U.S.
“I have asked her, the vice president, today because she’s the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and [the] Northern Triangle,” Biden said in 2021. “The country’s going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks stemming the migration to our southern border.”
The White House did not give Harris the official title of border czar, however, several news outlets did.
Bill D’Agostino posted a video on X showing various examples of the media calling Harris the border czar before Biden left the race.
“This will be her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border region since she was appointed as border czar by President Biden,” one Ed Lavandera, a CNN senior national correspondent, said on June 25, 2021.
“President Biden tapped Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris to be the border czar,” one CBS News reporter said.
Now, many outlets are saying that the reporting was never true.
“People are going to have to counter the misinformation,” MSNBC host Symone Sanders said on July 24. “I already hear folks talking about the border czar. She wasn’t the border czar.”
“Now she wasn’t the border czar, that’s what Republicans labeled her,” an ABC reporter said.
Neither President Biden or the White House ever gave Harris that title. The term czar is an informal moniker given to officials tasked with overseeing broad aspects of an issue.
There are reports from some of those same media outlets from early to mid-2021 stating that Harris’ team did not want Biden’s tasking Harris to find the “root causes of migration” to be mislabeled as the person in charge of securing the U.S. southern border or border policy.
A 2021 story from CNN reads in part, “Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff have sought to make one thing clear: She does not manage the southern border.”
The Washington Post ran the headline, “Republicans try to crown Harris the ‘border czar.’ She rejects the title” on April 16, 2021.
Axios reported in 2021 that Harris was “appointed by Biden as border czar.” The media outlet made a correction to the article on Wednesday, July 24.
The Axios piece now says Vice President Harris “never actually had” the title of border czar and that the “article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ back in 2021.”
Harris was never officially deemed the border czar and was never tasked to fix the southern border; she was tasked to find the root causes of migration. It was congressional Republicans and the media who gave Harris the title, and now the media is attempting to rewrite its own reporting.
