It’s very disappointing,” Brandon Judd, who recently retired as president of the Border Patrol Union, told Fox News. “We gave her the policies that she needed to implement. She refused to implement those.”

The recently retired head of the Border Patrol Union, Brandon Judd, told Fox News Digital, “It’s very disappointing.” “We provided her with the policies she had to put into effect. She declined to put those into practice.”

Judd’s remarks coincide with heightened scrutiny of Harris’s immigration and border security record in the days following Biden’s announcement that he would not be running for president and would instead support his vice president to succeed him. Critics claim Harris has fallen short on a key topic that will determine the outcome of the 2024 election.

In response to opponents who had already pointed out the increased influx of migrants within months of Biden’s election, the president appointed Harris to head the administration’s campaign to counter migration in March 2021.

On the day of the announcement, the Associated Press reported that Harris was assigned to supervise diplomatic endeavors in the Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Officials from the administration told AP that Harris would be tasked with developing a long-term plan to address the underlying causes of migration from those nations, in addition to working to pressure those nations to tighten immigration laws and safeguard their own borders.

“The vice president has agreed – among the multiple other things that I have her leading, and I appreciate it – agreed to lead our diplomatic effort to work with those nations to accept returnees and enhance migration enforcement at their borders,” Biden said during the announcement.

“Needless to say, the work will not be easy,” Harris said at the time. “But it is important work.”

Later in 2021, Harris negotiated a memorandum of understanding with Mexico that saw the U.S. send $4 billion to help Central American countries address root causes of illegal migration, with private companies kicking in an extra investment of $5.2 billion to the cause.

But the vice president’s work on the issue quickly fizzled out, an NBC News report published Thursday revealed, noting that Harris visited Mexico in June 2021 to sign an agreement that resulted in $4 billion in direct assistance and $5.2 billion in private-public investment but has not visited the border or countries to its south since January 2022.

Since 2021, the Root Causes strategy has made no new commitments, the report notes.

Nevertheless, the share of attempted crossings by migrants from the Northern Triangle has dropped significantly since 2021. According to government statistics, migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador made up 41% of all Border Patrol apprehensions in 2021. That number dropped to 22% of crossings in fiscal 2023, the data shows.

Despite a decrease in crossings from the Northern Triangle, illegal crossings reached all-time highs in 2021, 2022, and 2023 as migrants from around the world made their way to the U.S. border.

More than 30,000 Chinese migrants were arrested for illegally crossing the southern border in 2023, according to government data.

Judd, who worked as the union chief for most of the current administration, said the issues Harris identified were not the reason behind spikes in crossings.

“The major problem is the root causes she identified: political instability, climate and crime,” Judd said. “That was the same under President Trump, yet we did not see an explosion in illegal immigration under the Trump administration.”