US Vice President Kamala Harris remains
the Biden administration's border czar, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki insisted when responding to a journalist's remarks about the Guatemalan president's recent claims that he hasn't been in touch with any top US official since the summer.
The White House spokeswoman argued that the Biden administration has "had a range of conversations" with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, including a meeting that was attended by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in Washington last week. According to Psaki, Washington plans to "continue that high level of engagement".
It took Harris more than 70 days to visit the Latin American country after being assigned by President Biden as the point person to tackle immigration on 24 March. During the trip to Guatemala, the vice president was criticised for telling local migrants "not to come" to the US.
In late June, Harris paid a visit to El Paso, Texas, in what remains her one and only visit to the southern border as the nation's point person on migration.
Conservative critics, however, slammed the vice president for failing to visit Fort Bliss, where the government built the country's largest processing centre for unaccompanied migrant children, and other areas along
the southern border hit by the unprecedented amount of migrants.
Since assuming office in January, President Joe Biden, who was quick to reverse several tough immigration policies introduced by his predecessor Donald Trump, has been reluctant to publicly call the surge in migration a "crisis", despite the country having already recorded 172,331 land border encounters in the southwest by March 2021.
In the latest development, the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported a record 1.7 million migrant apprehensions along the southern border in fiscal 2021.