MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said on Tuesday she will again visit the U.S. border with Mexico, after criticism from Republican lawmakers for not prioritizing the shared frontier.
After meeting with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico City, Harris told reporters she had “been to the border before and will go again.”
Harris, who has been tasked by President Joe Biden to try to reduce the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, also visited Guatemala this week in her first trip abroad since taking office.
She defended her choice to make the visits south of the border in response to repeated questions from reporters, underscoring the Biden administration’s push to tackle the deeper reasons for migration from Central America.
Some Republican lawmakers have called on Harris to first look at the border, where migration has reached its highest levels in 20 years.
“You can’t say you care about the border without caring about the root causes,” Harris said.
She also described the situation at the U.S. southern border as a “legitimate, correct” concern, but called for looking deeper into the causes.
“We cannot have that question, and that conversation, without also giving equal weight and attention to what is causing that to occur,” she said.
Harris noted U.S.-Mexico cooperation over border security includes “the work of processing migration within the country of Mexico and its southern border.”
During an interview with NBC earlier on Tuesday, Harris remained cagey on why she had not yet made a trip to the U.S. southern border.
“At some point, you know, we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border,” she said.
Harris has not made a trip to the border since becoming vice president.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose; Writing by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
