The sheriff of the Arizona border county Vice President Kamala Harris visited on Friday had a good reason for talking up a message of conciliation before Harris arrived.
After all, Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels knows Harris could well be the next president of the United States.
But for the Harris presidential campaign, and any American who follows the news, the “welcome” Dannels extended had to come across as pretty rough — because nothing really hurts like the truth.
Dannels told the U.K.’s Daily Mail that he was glad to see Harris visiting as at least a step in the right direction.
“If we’re not engaging, we’re not talking, we can’t solve it,” Dannels said, according to the Daily Mail. “So that’s why it’s good that she’s coming, it truly is.”
But he also planned to give her a letter detailing the tragedies the open-border policies Harris has inflicted on the country as part of President Joe Biden’s administration.
“Number one, she is still our sitting vice president,” Dannels told the Daily Mail. “Number two, if she is elected as president, hopefully this will be a foundation that she’ll remember, because I want to share our tragedies, I want to share our reality to her,’ he said.
“I have a letter I’m going to give her when I meet her off she comes off the plane today.
“But the reality is setting all that aside to meet with her. [If] she gets elected, and then she does nothing to fix it. She can’t say she didn’t know about it.”
That’s putting it gently, of course. If Harris doesn’t know about the problems illegal immigration is causing, it’s because she doesn’t want to know about them.
And judging by news coverage of her trip, she didn’t learn much.
According to The Associated Press, Harris visited with local officials — including Dannels — then made a speech that sounded like it could have been given by Barack Obama back in 2012 — a decade before the onslaught of the Biden-Harris immigration invasion.
“I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane,” Harris said, according to the AP. “We can and we must do both.”
That’s the kind of pablum only the most committed progressives can swallow.
Prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration as president, his predecessor, Donald Trump, was well on the way to securing the border and had obtained the cooperation of the government in Mexico for a system that was “orderly, safe and humane.”
That was the system the Biden-Harris administration blew up. And Dannels can’t help but remind Harris of that.
Now, when it comes to welcoming gifts, a letter — a written record of the faults of the Biden-Harris administration in one hard-hit area of the country — is not exactly a bottle of wine and a dozen roses.
And there’s no doubt the Harris advance team and her political advisers saw Dannels’ statements as nothing but public sniping by a Republican who has previously been publicly scathing about Biden-Harris policies.
But if the atmosphere was poisoned by Dannels’ comments, Harris has only herself and her administration to blame.
The illegal immigration crisis foisted on the country has been a disaster since the beginning of the Biden administration — and it’s one that Harris’ Democratic Party embraces, even as it devastates Democratic-run cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston.
But its first and worst impacts were in the border counties — where lawmen like Dannels and other local officials have been forced to deal with it ever since.
Reminding Harris of that might make for a rough welcome, no matter how gently it’s put in public.
Because when it comes to the modern version of the Democratic Party, the truth tends to hurt — badly.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.