The Daily 202: Harris steps into new immigration mission with Central American leader calls this week

Vice President Harris this week will place her first telephone calls to Latin American leaders as she steps up efforts to fulfill her new mission of tackling the root causes of the migrant surge to the United States. 

The outreach, her first to the region since President Biden announced her special role last week, will occur over “the next several days,” a senior administration official said on the condition of anonymity to preview diplomatic outreach. Another official confirmed the timetable.

Biden faces an increasingly difficult situation at the border, where the number of migrants is spiking as the president quickly seeks to reverse former president Donald Trump’s policies. Harris’s calls with world leaders will be an early test of her new responsibilities.

“When she speaks, she speaks for me — doesn’t have to check with me,” the president said last Wednesday, underlining the importance of handing the daunting dossier to his vice president.

The administration official did not say which leaders Harris would be calling, but her new remit includes diplomatic contacts with Mexico and the “Northern Triangle” Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

“She is going to be working on a very accelerated and intensified timeline and effort with those four countries” to “surge” U.S. humanitarian assistance as well as ensure they can manage immigration internally, including refugee processing, the first official said. 

The official said Harris would consider three main criteria for a visit: First, what the pandemic picture is on the ground “not just for her and our team, but all of the people who would be involved.” Second, that the host country “thinks it’s appropriate and is eager to host a visit.” Finally, that the visit “helps advance the agenda substantively,” either because it’s to announce an agreement “or close negotiations and seal the deal.”

The first face-to-face might be something American schoolchildren know all too well, and a tool Biden has used liberally since taking office: Meetings by videoconference. 

In the days since Biden announced her new mission, Harris has already had detailed briefings and reached out to immigration experts in Congress, including Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.), and is looking to add a subject-matter specialist to her national security team, the first official said in a telephone interview.

The number of attempted border crossings rose starting in April 2020, but Biden’s decision not to deport unaccompanied minors on humanitarian grounds has strained federal facilities and Democrats are increasingly vocal about their concerns about conditions there. Republicans have seized on the issue, blaming the president’s policies for the increase.   

The Associated Press reports: “U.S. authorities apprehended more than 100,000 people as they attempted to cross the border in February, the most since spring 2019.”

In addition to the expectation of more humane treatment under Biden than Trump, migrants are increasingly fleeing Honduras and Guatemala, where the pandemic has crippled the economy. In November, Category 4 Hurricane Eta and Category 5 Hurricane Iota pounded Central America. That’s on top of longstanding gang violence, corruption and economic deprivation.

The official said Harris will stay involved in the administration’s response to the border. Her new mission, though, is to take point on diplomatic contacts with migrant home countries and oversee the flow, and use, of U.S. aid. 

Even before this week, Harris has been playing an unusually large role in the administration’s foreign policy, joining Biden for virtual summits and placing reaching out to world leaders by telephone. (I detailed some of that here.)

The official also underlined something that Biden and senior aides have said publicly: Aid from the United States to potential migrant home countries will go to non-governmental organizations and other parts of civil society, not government.

“There is so much corruption. It is really endemic and pervasive through a lot of the government structures,” the official said. “We’ll make sure that there are the right kinds of safeguards in place so we know our assistance has real impact.” 

In some ways, the focus reflects the way corruption led to the failures of past efforts — including one led by Biden as vice president — to keep migrants at home by bolstering their local economies with U.S. aid.

“I look forward to engaging in diplomacy with government, with private sector, with civil society, and the leaders of each in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to strengthen democracy and the rule of law, and ensure shared prosperity in the region,” Harris said last week.

Her outreach to Latin American leaders this week comes as the administration has stepped up its “the border is closed” messaging directly to potential migrants, encouraging them to seize local opportunities and avoid the perilous trek north. 

“If you deal with the problems in country, it benefits everyone,” Biden said last week. “It benefits us, it benefits the people, and it grows the economies there.”

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky signed an extension to the eviction moratorium, “further preventing the eviction of tenants who are unable to make rental payments. The moratorium that was scheduled to expire on March 31, 2021 is now extended through June 30, 2021,” the CDC announced. 

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are 90 percent effective in preventing infections in real-life conditions, according to a federal study released this morning, Lena Sun reports. 

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) announced that he has prostate cancer and is scheduled to have surgery next week. “I am in the hands of outstanding medical professionals and expect to make a full recovery,” Tillis, 60, said in a statement.

The murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged in George Floyd’s death, is underway. “The outcome of Chauvin’s trial is expected to influence those of the ex-MPD officers who also arrested Floyd,” Holly Bailey and Kim Bellware note. 

The big boat that could: The Ever Given, a massive cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal for days, was finally freed this morning and is sailing away, Sudarsan Raghavan, Heba Farouk Mahfouz and Antonia Noori Farzan report. Egypt is touting the release as a “heroic feat.” “Egyptians have succeeded today in ending the crisis of the stranded ship in the Suez Canal,” Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi said in a statement.  

Voting in the high-stakes, high-profile union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., ends today, but the final tally may take days, or even weeks or months, to determine. The drive has “mushroomed into one of the most important labor battles in recent history, even drawing the attention of President Biden,” Jay Greene reports. “But it won’t be decided quickly. The first step is to count the votes, and there are several opportunities in that process for both Amazon and the union to contest results.” 

• “How Larry Summers went from Obama’s top economic adviser to one of Biden’s loudest critics,” by David Lynch: “Brian Deese, the current head of the National Economic Council, was one of his closest aides during the financial crisis. The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Cecilia Rouse, had him as an adviser in graduate school. And Gene Sperling, who will oversee the president’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan, used to make annual trips with him to a Florida tennis camp. Just about everywhere you look in the Biden White House, you can see former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers’s influence. Everywhere, that is, except for the policies.”
• “As Myanmar’s security forces crush anti-coup protests, more and more children are dying,” by Shibani Mahtani: “The Myanmar military’s targeting of children, civilians and peaceful protesters, human rights experts say, constitute acts of terrorism, designed to subjugate a population that has risen up against the army’s seizure of power. After an especially bloody weekend, protesters and human rights groups are calling for stronger action from the international community, and warn that children are at particular risk.”

• “Parler explains ‘free speech’ to angry users after sharing Capitol riot posts with the FBI,” by Mashable’s Matt Binder: “The comments section quickly filled up with some of Parler’s users accusing the right wing social media platform of ‘ratting out’ the site’s own members. … The company was compelled to release a statement addressing those outraged users. In doing so, Parler found itself unironically explaining the First Amendment to its user base filled with members who declare themselves to be ‘Constitutionalists’ and ‘Free Speech’ advocates. … ‘The First Amendment does not protect violence inciting speech, nor the planning of violent acts. Such content violates Parler’s TOS,’ [Parler wrote].”
• “U.S. nuclear weapons are aging quickly. With few spare parts, how long can they last?” by McClatchy D.C.’s Lara Copp: “Next month Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will seek billions to keep the 50-year-old land based missiles running while a debate begins on whether they should be replaced. It’s a difficult ask: At the same time, the Pentagon is also in the middle of the most expensive nuclear modernization effort in its history. All three legs of the nuclear triad — air, land and sea defenses launched from silos, overhead strategic bombers or nuclear submarines — are getting replaced with newer weapons systems, simultaneously.”

• “The two-pronged package Biden will begin unveiling this week includes higher amounts of federal spending but also significantly more in new tax revenue — with possibly as much as $4 trillion in new spending and more than $3 trillion in tax increases,” Jeff Stein reports. This is a partial response to concerns raised by members of the White House National Economic Council, who grew concerned that original plans to spend $3 trillion while only rising $1 trillion via new tax hikes would jeopardize the nation’s long-term financial stability. 
• “The choice to limit the impact on the federal deficit may help the White House counter critics who say that the nation’s spending imbalance is out of control. But it also sets up the administration for an enormous political challenge in convincing Congress to pass a package of tax increases on wealthy Americans and companies that together would represent the largest tax hike in generations.” 

• Ahead of the reveal of Biden’s next spending plan, an aide to the Senate majority leader said “he has reached out to the Senate parliamentarian on the question of whether the reconciliation process can be used a second time related to the fiscal year 2021 budget,”  John Wagner reports. “The aide … stressed that no final decision has been made on legislative strategy.”

• “In her first interview since Senate confirmation, Ms. Tai said she recognized that the tariffs can exact a toll on U.S. businesses and consumers, though proponents have said they also help shield companies from subsidized foreign competition,” the Wall Street Journal’s Bob Davis and Yuka Hayashi report. “ ‘I have heard people say, ‘Please just take these tariffs off,’ Ms. Tai said. But ‘yanking off tariffs,’ she warned, could harm the economy unless the change is ‘communicated in a way so that the actors in the economy can make adjustments.’ ”
• “She indicated some interest in suggestions by free traders such as former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the Business Roundtable, a big-business group, that lifting tariffs should come as part of new negotiations with China over issues of subsidies, state-owned businesses and other structural issues.”

• Last month, the president, standing in the White House’s State Dining Room, “recalled the centuries-old ‘for want of a nail’ proverb — the one about the outsize significance of small things,” CQ’s John Donnelly reports. He “then held up a tiny semiconductor, a component that is smaller than a postage stamp and that he said contains 8 billion transistors, each of which is 10,000 times thinner than a single human hair. That chip, he said, is a ’21st-century horseshoe nail.’ Biden was talking about semiconductors because a recent shortage of them, due partly to a pandemic-driven surge in computer usage, has triggered an economic crisis in some sectors.”
• The struggle for these chips has pit America and its allies against China. The pandemic has highlighted the U.S.’s over-reliance on overseas supplies of these chips, and the risks that come from depending on companies either based in China or close enough to it.
• “Washington is poised to spend a lot of money, perhaps $37 billion just for starters, to address the problem. But some say America may be too far behind to catch up. And the federal money will only help if it is accompanied by an implementation strategy that is so far incomplete, experts said.”

• “Experts estimate [the stimulus bill] will pull 4.1 million children out of poverty and cut the remaining population of kids in poverty by more than 40 percent. … But little of the optimism framing the law has touched [people like D.C. resident Chakyya] Harrison. The morning the money appeared, she drove to a nearby liquor store to fill out a money order for the March rent — $1010,” Kyle Swenson reports.
• “The sense of relief she felt when the stimulus money arrived soon faded. She still owed back rent and late fees — $1,721. She needed to pay the Internet service — $50. The cellphone bill — $75. Pampers and wipes for the babies — $80. By the time she paid for all that, the stimulus money would be down to about $1,000, not enough to cover April’s rent and who knew what else might come up. Every dollar she received went to make up for a dollar she didn’t have earlier.” 
• “Most estimates of the bill’s impact do not dive into how debt might affect whether families will rise from poverty. But research by the National Bureau of Economic Research has shown that more than 50 percent of Americans reported they spent the majority of past stimulus checks on paying off debt.” 

• The report, set to be released tomorrow, “offers the most detailed look yet at what happened in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and early 2020. However, the findings are far from conclusive and will be overshadowed by questions about China’s lack of transparency — and the WHO’s apparent inability to press for more,” Emily Rauhala reports. “Questions about Chinese interference will be hard to shake… [Since] much of the data was collected by Chinese scientists ahead of the visit and then analyzed by the joint team.”
• “The mission concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the virus accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan— a theory many scientists downplay for lack of evidence, but that others are not ready to dismiss after a single, hours-long visit,” Rauhala writes. The report does not recommend additional research into the lab leak hypothesis but does recommend “further study of the possible path of transmission between animals and humans and on transmission through frozen food — a once-fringe theory favored by Chinese government scientists.”
• The report found that a Wuhan market linked to early cases “was not necessarily the source of the virus” but “may have been the site of an early outbreak or an ‘amplification event’” that allowed the virus to spread.

“I think what we need to be focused on is making sure we’re protecting ourselves and protecting the world going forward. And that’s going to require a lot of reform. And it’s going to require China to do things that it hasn’t done in the past,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN, saying the U.S. will not seek to punish China for the coronavirus crisis.  

“Bills to ban transgender kids from sports try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist,” writes U.S. national soccer team player Megan Rapinoe: “Transgender kids want the opportunity to play sports for the same reasons other kids do: to be a part of a team where they feel like they belong. Proponents of these bills argue that they are protecting women. As a woman who has played sports my whole life, I know that the threats to women’s and girls’ sports are lack of funding, resources and media coverage; sexual harassment; and unequal pay. I know what it feels like to be singled out and treated differently.”

“Defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan. 6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown by tech companies,” USA Today reports. “In one case, a crowdfunding website set up in late 2020 has been adopted by a defendant charged with storming the Capitol, who used it to raise almost $180,000. His was one of eight fundraisers on the site as of last week, and his donations accounted for 84% of the money raised on the platform.”

Biden will today at 2:10 p.m. provide an update on the government’s response to the pandemic, including a “state of vaccinations,” during White Hosue remarks. 

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