(Headline USA) Vice President Kamala Harris continued to draw criticism on Monday for her blatant lack of concern with the US–Mexico border crisis.
After Harris openly defied President Joe Biden by refusing to step into a role overseeing the chaotic surge of illegal immigrants, the head of the union representing U.S. Border Patrol agents said she was shirking her duty for fear of bad optics.
“If she goes to the U.S. border, people are going to expect her to fix the problem, so she avoids it,” Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Fox News, according to BizPac Review.
“That’s disgusting because that’s putting politics ahead what’s best for this country,” Judd said.
Instead, Harris took a detour while visiting North Carolina on Monday to sit at the same lunch counter where four black college students conducted a peaceful sit-in 61 years ago that became defining moment in the civil rights movement.
On Twitter, Harris’s self-described fan club described the photo-op as “powerful.”
Harris, who was in North Carolina to plug President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, made an unscheduled visit to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro.
The museum contains the “whites only” Woolworth’s counter where students Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Jibreel Khazan (formerly Ezell Blair Jr.) and David Richmond staged their historic sit-in on Feb. 1, 1960.
The Greensboro Four—students at the North Carolina A&T State University—were refused service and declined to give up their seats even as the store manager and police urged them to move on.
The manager eventually closed the store early instead of serving the four men. The protest was not the first lunch counter sit-in, but garnered national attention and spurred dozens more sit-ins throughout the country. Another section of the original lunch counter is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Clarence Henderson, who participated in the second day of the sit-in on Feb. 2, 1960, has since become an outspoken conservative. He supported former president Donald Trump by delivering an address during last year’s Republican National Convention.
“The media is trying to convince you to conform to the same old Democratic talking points,” Henderson said in his speech.
“You know what that will get you? The same old results,” he continued. “If you do vote for Biden, you don’t know history.”
Headline USA reached out to Henderson via email and will update with any response.
Harris’ visit came on the same day that a jury in Minneapolis began deliberating in the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd, whose death has become a touchstone in the Black Lives Matter movement and radical leftist calls to defund and abolish the police.
Harris also checked out another display at the museum: the bus seat that civil rights icon Rosa Parks refused to give up to a white man in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. That spurred a bus boycott led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and eventually culminated with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
During one of the most poignant moments of the Democrat presidential primary last year, Harris claimed to have been among the victims of segregated busing while growing up in Berkeley, Calif., during the 1960s, before eventually moving to Canada.
Harris confronted then fellow candidate Joe Biden about his support for segregated buses and his professed resolve to work with pro-segregationist Democrats early in his career.
Biden’s problematic past in issues of race—and a long history of racist gaffes—played a substantial part in his decision to select Harris as his running mate. He indicated that his top criteria were someone who was black and female, regardless of qualifications.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
