Press Releases

Today, Congressman Glenn Grothman (WI-06) expressed his dismay that Vice President Kamala Harris would come to Wisconsin while still not having toured the Mexican border.

“For Kamala Harris to spend one more day not at the border is to send the message to the Mexican drug cartels and potential illegal immigrants around the world that the United States does not care about our immigration laws,” said Grothman. “I’ve visited the border three times since the beginning of 2020 and can confidently say that you cannot truly know the scope of the crisis at the border, much less attempt to solve it, without talking to CBP and ICE agents, local law enforcement officials, and citizens living on the border who experience the crisis on a daily basis.

“Since I assume that President Biden expected Harris to immediately take charge of the situation, it shows that she has no regard for his authority. The combination of people streaming across our border and his Vice President apparently disregarding his wishes makes the Biden Administration look weak and disorganized. I fear that since the top White House official in charge of addressing the border crisis has spent her first six weeks absent from the border, Harris has discredited herself to border patrol agents and wonder if they will open up and tell her what is really going on if she does decide to take this crisis seriously and speak with them.

“Illegal crossings and encounters at our Southwest border have skyrocketed, reaching 172,331 last month, a 15-year high for March. This means at the U.S.-Mexican border, we are having contact with over 5,500 people a day, in addition to an estimated 1,000 people a day coming across the border without any contact from U.S. personnel. This represents approximately a fivefold increase compared to this time last year.

“This is the biggest crisis facing the United States today. As people are crossing into the U.S. illegally, some of them are criminals, some are drug dealers, and some of them will become a public charge. Others are simply trying to skip the line ahead of those people who are immigrating legally.

“On top of this, in March, we saw over 18,000 unaccompanied minors cross the border, which is an all-time high for a single month. This has led to overcrowded facilities and border patrol agents wondering how they will deal with this massive influx. The Vice President claims to care about the well-being of these children, but when it came time to act, she was, and still is, glaringly absent.

“While Wisconsinites should normally be happy to host the Vice President, in this case, we are being used as a pawn in her game of showing how little she cares about the border.”

On Wednesday, March 24, 2021, President Biden tapped Harris to lead White House efforts to resolve the crisis at the border. The same day, during an interview with CBS, Harris said about the border crisis "It’s a huge problem. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. It’s a huge problem”. As of sending this, Harris is yet to see firsthand the “huge problem” that she has been tasked with resolving.

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