It would be wrong to say the attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris record as border czar began the moment Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 campaign.

Thats because the attacks began long ago.

Ever since a spring 2021 White House meeting when Biden announced he was asking Harris to take the lead on a major immigration initiative, the vice president has been the face of the administrations response to migration at the Southern border. As crossings have surged, Harris has taken the blame for policies that Republican lawmakers and many voters say have been a disaster.

You can see the toll on her reputation in a late July YouGov poll : Just 30% of voters said they trusted her over Donald Trump on immigration. And Republicans are hard at work making sure that reputation sticks.

As a result of her dangerously extreme immigration policies, the largest invasion in history is now taking place at our southern border, Trump said on a Tuesday conference call for reporters.

The day before, the Republican National Committee had distributed a press release and video of the 2021 White House meeting. Here is the moment Biden crowned Kamala border czar in 2021, the RNC posted on its official X (formerly Twitter) account.

But if you actually watch that video, youll notice something: Biden never called Harris a border czar, or even implied shell be taking the lead for administration policy. As the full meeting transcript makes clear, he was simply tapping Harris to work with foreign governments, businesses and local organizations on the root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

She was not in charge of what happened at the U.S.-Mexico border. She was not a border czar, Theresa Cardinal Brown , director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told HuffPost.

That doesnt mean Harris can or should avoid questions about Biden administration immigration policy. She has been a voice in the room. And given the positions she took before becoming vice president, its entirely possible she would have taken a similar approach to the border had she, not Biden, been the ultimate decision maker.

But a fair analysis of Harris record should start with a look at how she carried out her real mission, rather than the mythical job of border czar. The picture that emerges based in part on conversations with a half dozen analysts looks quite a bit different from the one Republicans have been painting. It also offers some important clues about how she might govern if she wins in November.

Why Immigration Policy Has Been So Difficult

To understand what Biden asked Harris to do in 2021, it helps to understand the situation he inherited when he took over as president. That story actually goes back to when he was vice president, when a then-unprecedented surge of migrants at the Southern border overwhelmed public and private resources in 2014, creating chaos.

Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who were predominantly men from Mexico looking to find work while avoiding authorities, this group had large numbers of women and (frequently unaccompanied) children hoping to stay in the U.S. using the legal asylum process. And they were from those Northern Triangle countries, not Mexico.

As officials tried desperately to figure out how to process these migrants through a system never designed to accommodate them, then-President Barack Obama dispatched Biden to address what he and his advisers believed were the underlying forces prompting so many people to leave their home countries in the first place.

These root causes included not just a lack of economic opportunity but also high rates of gang violence. Both problems had defied attempts at redress because of rampant government corruption in the Triangle nations, making political reform in those countries an important part of the job. Violence against children and women was another concern, because its what made conditions so deplorable that women were willing to risk their lives or send their children away with smugglers.

With Biden taking the lead, the Obama administration sent more aid to the Northern Triangle countries. But they had only two years, and Trump, whose singular focus was on stopping migrants at the border, cut the assistance and scaled back other efforts to make it easier to process refugees. When Biden became president, he restarted the initiatives and handed his old portfolio to Harris.