Daily Caller
Harris Took The Reins On Solving A Key Region’s Migrant Crisis — Nearly 1.8 Million People Crossed Into US Anyway

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Over a million migrants hailing from Central America have crossed illegally into the U.S. since Vice President Kamala Harris was tapped to address the illegal immigration crisis stemming from that region.
Since the launch of her presidential campaign, Harris and her allies have vehemently pushed back on the narrative that she was appointed to serve as “border czar” for the White House, arguing that she was only given a limited role addressing the “root causes” of illegal migration stemming from Central America. However, roughly 1.7 million people from the Northern Triangle region, which includes El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, flooded into the U.S. after she was tasked with mitigating the crisis.
“It’s total chaos on the border, and has been for the last three and a half years,” retired Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott said about the current border situation to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “America is put at risk for no good reason and they’re being sold a bill of goods that’s just not true.”
Border Patrol agents deployed along the southern border encountered a total of 1,739,795 migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras attempting to cross illegally into the country between April 2021 — Harris’ first full month serving as “border czar” — and June 2024, according to a review of the latest available data by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border,” Biden publicly declared on March 24, 2021.
The president added that there was nobody “better qualified” to handle the task and said she wouldn’t have to check in with him because she “knows what she’s doing.”
“But — so, Madam Vice President, thank you. I gave you a tough job, and you’re smiling, but there’s no one better capable of trying to organize this for us,” Biden continued.
Since that speech was given, 253,027 illegal migrants from El Salvador, 798,678 illegal migrants from Guatemala and 688,090 illegal migrants from Honduras have descended on the U.S.-Mexico border — totaling the more than 1.7 million encounters, according to CBP data. The numbers under Harris’ “border czar” tenure surpass the roughly 1,098,000 Border Patrol apprehensions of these three nationalities seen under the Trump administration from fiscal year 2017 to fiscal year 2020, according to past CBP data.
What further exacerbated the immigration crisis under the Biden-Harris administration was the influx of other foreign nationals who have used Central America as a way station en route to the U.S. border — most notably Venezuelans. While non-Central Americans did not technically fall under the vice president’s purview, the lack of border enforcement in the region has skyrocketed the U.S. asylum crisis.
Less than 50,000 Venezuelan nationals were encountered by Border Patrol agents in fiscal year 2021, according to CBP data. That number blew up to more than 187,000 in fiscal year 2022 and peaked at more than 200,600 in fiscal year 2023.
Venezuelans are far from the only ones crossing the Central American region in their journey to illegally enter the U.S. More than half a million U.S.-bound migrants crossed the Darien Gap — a dense jungle that spans across the border of Panama and Colombia — in 2023 alone, according to the Council on Foreign Relations
Illegal border crossings from other nationalities have also exploded under Harris’ “border czar” tenure.
There were less than 2,000 encounters with Chinese nationals at the southern border in fiscal year 2022, according to CBP Data. That figure exploded to over 24,000 in fiscal year 2023 and has already surpassed 33,000 this fiscal year, despite the year not yet over.
Similar spikes in illegal southern border crossings took place under the Biden-Harris administration by Indians, Turks, Nicaraguans, Russians and other nationalities.
Republicans have long hammered Harris for allegedly not taking the border crisis seriously, and recently released surveys indicate that most Americans believe her to be supportive of “open borders.”
For her part, Harris did visit Central America in June 2021 and warned would-be illegal migrants: “Do not come. Do not come.” She also visited the U.S.-Mexico border once in June 2021 after facing mounting pressure to do so.
Since Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential contest and Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, she has attempted to cast herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor who would govern with border hawk tendencies. Her campaign has released two different advertisements claiming she would “fix” the border crisis and hire more Border Patrol agents.
Harris previously supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings, but the latest statements from her campaign suggest she has completely flipped on the position. It’s also not immediately clear if her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, remains a supporter of sanctuary city policies.
“The truth is, Vice President Kamala Harris has always been for open borders. She can’t run from that,” said Joey Chester, communications manager for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, in a statement to the DCNF.
Chester listed Harris’ past opposition for a border wall, rejection of more funding for Border Patrol agents and detention beds and past support for DACA beneficiaries to be compensated as congressional employees as reasons to be suspect of her current pivot to the right on border enforcement.
“These policies have proven disastrous and are deeply unpopular with the American people,” he added. “Words can’t change the fact that the current state of America’s borders, and the influx of illegal aliens in the United States today, is the doing of President Biden and Vice President Harris.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Flickr/Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Daily Caller
What Happened in Butler, PA?

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Former State Department official Mike Benz raised serious concerns on Fox News Monday about the events surrounding the shooting in Butler, Pa., asking whether federal law enforcement played a more significant role than originally reported.
It’s been a year since the shooting of President Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, and while investigations have shed light on the incident, several critical questions remain unanswered. During an appearance on “The Will Cain Show,” Benz said he believes the lack of transparency in the case has led to many critical questions remaining unanswered.
“So the question is, if Crooks was cultivated or if he was being monitored or potentially interacted with by federal law enforcement agents who put him onto that? And I think that the total lack of transparency, it’s sort of defying the laws of surveillance state physics,” Benz said. “I think most people believe that if federal law enforcement were to get ahold of their phone, that pretty much everything could be scraped from it. You don’t know if, for example, in this case, he was communicating with a foreign government.”
Benz then raised concerns that the investigation into the Butler shooting could extend beyond the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), suggesting that agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) might be involved in cracking encrypted communications.
WATCH:
“This, to me, may go beyond, you know, FBI, DHS. We know that the NSA is able to crack these sorts of things. And so it’s all very strange to me,” Benz said. “But, again, there’s another whistleblower report that I believe Josh Hawley’s whistleblower mentioned, which was that HSI [Homeland Security Investigation] agents kind of mysteriously replaced a fair number of Secret Service agents that day because Secret Service was said to be split between the NATO summit and Jill Biden being away.”
Benz referred to what he called a troubling series of events leading up to the Butler shooting.
“And that Secret Service had denied, I think, about 10 requests for additional security from the Trump campaign prior to the shooting. And so it is just a strange confluence of variables that just do not sit well for the American public,” Benz said. “And I think that there should be a sort of transparency task force so that these specific questions about HSI and the potential recruiting as an informant about the contents of the phone and the like can be answered.”
A report released Sept. 2024 uncovered whistleblower allegations about the Secret Service’s security failures during the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler. The office of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri published the whistleblower report and revealed previously undisclosed claims about the DHS and Secret Service committing multiple failures.
Whistleblowers allege that the agent in charge of the Butler rally failed a key examination during federal training and was considered “low-caliber.” The report also said that the Secret Service’s intelligence units were absent from the rally, which contributed to communication failures between law enforcement agencies.
Senior U.S. Secret Service officials were aware of a “classified threat” to Trump’s life 10 days before the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt but failed to inform the agents protecting him. A report from the Government Accountability Office said Sunday that the intelligence, presented to Secret Service leadership, never reached the field team due to a “siloed practice for sharing classified information.”
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News)
Daily Caller
USAID Quietly Sent Thousands Of Viruses To Chinese Military-Linked Biolab

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) shipped thousands of viral samples to a lab in Wuhan over the course of a 10-year program even though it had no formal agreement with the lab in place, according to previously unreported documents.
The documents show that USAID funded the exportation of 11,000 samples from Yunnan Province, where some of the closest relatives of the COVID-19 virus circulate, to Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic, with no apparent plan for ensuring the samples were not misdirected to bioweapons and remained accessible to the U.S. government.
A $210 million USAID public health program called PREDICT, steered by the University of California-Davis, collected viral samples in countries throughout the globe but lacked long-term storage when funding dried up, according to rudimentary plans in 2019.
Dear Readers:
As a nonprofit, we are dependent on the generosity of our readers.
Please consider making a small donation of any amount here.
Thank you!
USAID’s sample dispensation plan for China is sparse: “No need [sic] information from Yunnan. They were never an official lab partner for PREDICT. All samples they helped collected [sic] are sent to, tested, and stored in Wuhan.”
The “lab” refers to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). WIV was a close partner of USAID contractor EcoHealth Alliance and a slated partner for a PREDICT-like program supported by the State Department. The lab has poor biosafety practices and ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
One of the closest known relatives of the COVID virus is among the viruses sampled with USAID funding.
“Investigations involving USAID’s former funding of global health awards remain active and ongoing,” a senior State Department official said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The American people can rest assured knowing that under the Trump Administration we will not be funding these controversial programs.”
The internal documents were obtained through a FOIA lawsuit brought by U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit newsroom and public health research group.
The shuttering of USAID – which was officially completed Tuesday – has ignited a debate about its net impact on global health. A study in The Lancet projected an association between a dropoff in USAID funding and 14 million deaths based on an epidemiological model.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement Tuesday that USAID spending has often undermined rather than strengthened American interests.
“Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War,” Rubio said. “Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown.”
The now-defunct agency’s connection to the Wuhan lab complicates its global health legacy.
“The USAID $210 million contract for PREDICT should have included contractual terms that required all samples, or at least copies of all samples, be transferred to and stored by a US government facility,” said Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright told the DCNF. “The PREDICT grift did none of this.”
UC Davis did not respond to a request for comment. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Today marks the first day of the State Department's America First foreign assistance rebranding initiative, led by @SecRubio.
Consistent branding will ensure contributions made by the the United States will be immediately recognized as American.
"The redesign is very simple,… pic.twitter.com/HZnbOxU0Sq
— Department of State (@StateDept) July 2, 2025
Did USAID Fund COVID’s Ancestor?
Many of the viruses stored at the lab in Wuhan may have been sampled with U.S. funding yet remain out of reach for U.S. government entities investigating the origins of COVID.
The samples were set to be preserved for testing – with human samples preserved for 10 years – the documents show. But the documents suggest that requirement was never incorporated into a formal contract with USAID.
The two scientists supervising the samples were: Ben Hu, a virologist at the WIV, who reportedly became sick with COVID-like symptoms in 2019; and Peter Daszak, a scientist who was debarred from federal funding after the U.S. government deemed him a threat to public safety for inadequate oversight of the research in Wuhan.
Hu and Daszak did not reply to requests for comment.
The documents show PREDICT contractors discussing viral samples taken from wildlife and stored in India, Liberia, Malaysia, the Republic of Congo and China. Some of the samples were stored in virus-transport media (VTM), which allows researchers to store live viruses for later use in the lab.
“It’s not rocket science to require a contract and supporting paperwork which establishes a relationship, testing protocol, and chain of custody, when one is sending out lab samples,” said Reuben Guttman, a partner at Guttman, Buschner & Brooks PLLC who specializes in ensuring the integrity of government programs, in an interview with the DCNF. “In any scientific endeavor, you need confidence in your results. That requires paperwork to prove your methodology is sound.”
-
Addictions1 day ago
Why B.C.’s new witnessed dosing guidelines are built to fail
-
Frontier Centre for Public Policy2 days ago
Canada’s New Border Bill Spies On You, Not The Bad Guys
-
Business1 day ago
Carney Liberals quietly award Pfizer, Moderna nearly $400 million for new COVID shot contracts
-
Energy2 days ago
CNN’s Shock Climate Polling Data Reinforces Trump’s Energy Agenda
-
Opinion1 day ago
Preston Manning: Three Wise Men from the East, Again
-
Opinion1 day ago
Charity Campaigns vs. Charity Donations
-
Business1 day ago
Mark Carney’s Fiscal Fantasy Will Bankrupt Canada
-
Red Deer1 day ago
Westerner Days Attraction pass and New Experiences!