“It’s not my first trip,” snapped “border czar” Kamala Harris to a reporter in El Paso Friday. “I’ve been to the border many times.” Not as vice president and not until she’d served 93 days as the person President Joe Biden tapped to be the face of his open-borders crisis.

Of course, given that she showed up in El Paso, which as our Douglas Andrews noted last Thursday is “some 800 miles from where the action is,” she might as well have stayed in Washington. Or gone to Europe. But hey, at least she went to Guatemala to opine about “root causes.”

Political analyst John Daniel Davison summed up the political theater:

She visited a Border Patrol station about nine miles from the Rio Grande, talked to some immigration activists and legal service providers, posed for press photos back at the airport, and departed for Los Angeles before 1 p.m. Even the choice of El Paso was pure theatrics. Instead of going to the epicenter of the crisis, on the other end of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, Harris reportedly chose El Paso because that’s where the Trump administration first implemented its short-lived family separation policy. Politics, not the harsh realities on the border, was her motivation.

Notably, directly across the border from El Paso is one of the most dangerous cities in the world — Ciudad Juárez. Any migrant with any sense at all would totally avoid crossing into the U.S. there.

As for why she avoided other border areas? “The reason she did not go to the Rio Grande Valley is that’s where the Biden cages are,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz asserted. “That’s where you see cage after cage after cage of little boys and little girls on the floor, no mats, no cots, side-by-side, one after the other after the other, wrapped in reflective emergency blankets. That’s where you see facilities with the rate of COVID positivity of 10%.”

Nevertheless, in the face of a crisis that has seen 500,000 migrants illegally cross the border (elsewhere) since Harris took over as border czar (including a record-setting May), we can understand why she’s touchy. “Why did you decide that right now was the right time to make your first trip to the border?” the reporter asked. The correct answer is that Donald Trump announced his own trip to the border later this week — a trip that by the virtue of its happening will highlight that he secured the border and Team Biden-Harris has undone much of that work.

Instead, she lied about having been there already, knowing the media wouldn’t challenge her on it, and for good measure argued, “We inherited a tough situation.”

Harris did her level best to sound like this is all going according to plan, though. “I said back in March I was going to come to the border,” she insisted, “so this is not a new plan.”

One person has only so much time in the day, and she had to address more important issues, like marching in that pride parade earlier this month.

Harris has received due criticism from the Right and the Left for not visiting the border. How do you effectively address a crisis without firsthand knowledge and experience? And yet her visit there accomplished exactly nothing of substance, because the Harris-Biden goal is not to solve the crisis but to manage it for political gain.

The root cause of the immigration crisis? Biden and Harris have laid out the welcome mat.