Vice President and Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris, aka the “Border Czar,” is desperately trying to make people forget that Joe Biden ever gave her that title. As millions of illegal immigrants have flooded across the U.S. southern border, and illegal immigration is a top election issue, she has done everything possible to portray herself as having nothing to do with the border disaster. But with less than a week before the election, Harris’s buddies at the Department of Homeland Security have offered up their own bit of bad optics for her campaign.
Along a Texas interstate is a billboard that reads, “Your brother in immigration custody has rights. We’re here to help.” The offer of free legal help to those in the country illegally comes from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman (IDO). Who is paying for these billboards to go up not just in Texas but in other states as well? The American taxpayer.
The IDO was started in 2019 and is an independent office within DHS. Among their duties are hearing complaints about possible violations of immigration detention standards and oversight of detention facilities. Needless to say, those whose job it is to protect the border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, are not happy. Both agencies are struggling with limited funding, yet the Department that is supposed to be on their side is essentially working against them.
DHS will not give specifics about how many signs were paid for with taxpayer funds, how much each one cost, how many have been put up, and where they are. They have also not addressed the idea that the billboards might be sending the wrong message, that the agency in charge of enforcing illegal immigration law might not be doing so, as if we didn’t already know that. They have merely given a talking points answer, outlining the history of the office and the standard: “DHS and its employees provide the highest standard of care for individuals detained in its custody.”
Texas Republican Congressmen Reps. Chip Roy and Tony Gonzales have voiced their opposition to the billboards. Roy blasted the Biden-Harris administration and DHS, saying,
“The news that DHS is using taxpayer money to launch billboards advocating ‘rights’ for individuals in ‘immigration custody’ should be alarming because it’s a preview of the legal arguments that radical progressive democrats will use to argue against deportation of the millions dumped in America by Biden-Harris-Mayorkas. Congress should NOT be funding propaganda to undermine our own laws. That’s insane. Americans should not PAY for free legal advice to foreign criminals.”
Gonzalez also stated of the billboards,
“Whether it’s FEMA splurging hundreds of millions of dollars on migrant housing or OIDO running ads like this, our government is hemorrhaging money on the wrong priorities. It’s time for Congress to pull the plug on programs like these.”
The problem, if Kamala Harris is elected president, is that programs like this will stay in place, and it will be much harder for Gonzalez and the rest of the House of Representatives to do away with them. There is no question that the candidate who simultaneously says she is a “change agent” yet went on “The View” and told those hard-hitting journalists there, when asked, that there was nothing she would do differently than Joe Biden. The border will remain wide open, and more taxpayer money will be used to make life easier for those who should not be here in the first place.
Just a preview of things to come from a Harris-Walz administration.
