If the worst fears of Europe are realised and the battle in Ukraine spreads throughout the continent to different neighbours of Russia, then Finland might be prepared.
It has provides. At the least six months of all main fuels and grains sit in strategic stockpiles, whereas pharmaceutical corporations are obliged to have 3-10 months’ value of all imported medicine readily available.
It has civilian defences. All buildings above a sure dimension should have their very own bomb shelters, and the remainder of the inhabitants can use underground automotive parks, ice rinks, and swimming swimming pools which stand able to be transformed into evacuation centres.
And it has fighters. Virtually a 3rd of the grownup inhabitants of the Nordic nation is a reservist, which means Finland can draw on one of many greatest militaries relative to its dimension in Europe.
“We’ve ready our society, and have been coaching for this case ever because the second world battle,” says Tytti Tuppurainen, Finland’s EU minister. After spending eight a long time dwelling first within the shadow of the Soviet Union and now Russia, the specter of battle in Europe “has not hit us as a shock”.
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The improvised “complete defence” technique that has outlined Ukraine’s dogged defence in opposition to Russia’s invasion, with newly-weds and shopkeepers reportedly taking on arms, has captivated individuals around the globe.
However what Finland calls its technique of “complete safety” presents an instance of how international locations can create rigorous, society-wide techniques to guard themselves forward of time — planning not only for a possible invasion, but in addition for pure disasters or cyber assaults or a pandemic.
This isn’t solely about army readiness. It additionally extends to what Charly Salonius-Pasternak, a safety knowledgeable on the Finnish Institute of Worldwide Affairs, describes because the “boring, unsexy work” of making certain that legal guidelines and guidelines work in occasions of disaster.
Finland has created casual networks between the elites of the political, enterprise and non-governmental-organisation worlds to organize for the worst. It appears to be like repeatedly at what its principal weaknesses are, and tries to right them to create as a lot resilience within the system earlier than a disaster occurs.
The battle in Ukraine has underscored how uncovered Finland, with its 1,340km border with Russia, is to assault. The prospect of becoming a member of the Nato army alliance is now being mentioned by Finnish leaders, as international locations throughout Europe reassess their ranges of co-operation on defence and safety. For the primary time in its historical past, a majority of Finns now assist making use of for Nato membership.
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However the nation of 5.5mn individuals additionally sees the urgency of sustaining and upgrading its nationwide technique.
“Given our geostrategic location, and our giant land mass and sparse inhabitants, we have to have the whole lot to defend the nation . . . We prepare on many ranges frequently to verify all people is aware of what to do — the political decision-making, what do the banks do, the church does, trade does, what’s media’s position,” says Janne Kuusela, director-general for defence coverage on the defence ministry. “The top result’s you may flip this society into disaster mode if wants be.”
The Winter Battle legacy
A lot of Finland’s preparedness stems from its personal battle with Moscow, which has echoes on the invasion of Ukraine. In 1939-40, Finns fought within the brutal Winter Battle to carry off the Soviet Union, however misplaced a big chunk of their territory in consequence, together with their most cosmopolitan metropolis, Vyborg, and one in all their principal areas of trade. Rebuilding after this battle, Finns vowed: by no means once more.
“We’ve had onerous experiences in historical past many occasions. We haven’t forgot it, it’s in our DNA. That’s the reason we now have been very cautious in sustaining our resilience,” says president Sauli Niinisto. He factors to opinion polls suggesting about three-quarters of Finns are prepared to battle for his or her nation, by far the best determine in Europe.
Finland has a wartime troop power of about 280,000 individuals whereas in complete it has 900,000 skilled as reservists. It carried on with conscription for all school-leavers even after the tip of the chilly battle, when many international locations in Europe stopped, and Helsinki has maintained sturdy defence spending whilst others lower within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s.
Detailed planning is in place for how you can deal with an invasion, together with the deployment of fighter jets to distant roads across the nation, the laying of mines in key transport lanes, and the preparation of land defences similar to blowing up bridges.
Jarmo Lindberg, Finland’s former chief of defence, says that the Finnish capital Helsinki “is like Swiss cheese” with dozens of kilometres of tunnels. “There are areas like a James Bond movie,” he provides. All armed power headquarters are positioned in hillsides below “30-40 metres of granite,” he says.
If a possible assault was detected by army intelligence, forces can be mobilised and, so far as attainable, civilians can be evacuated from hazard areas, a marked distinction to what has occurred in Ukraine.
Kuusela says that the very core of Finland’s technique is the need of its residents to battle and defend a rustic, not too long ago named by the UN for the fifth 12 months in a row because the world’s happiest nation.
“Being a Finn is a deal,” he provides. “We’re primary on the earth in being blissful. Alternatively, the opposite aspect is that you’re ready to defend this . . . We had a near-death expertise within the second world battle that solely strengthened us.”
Strategic stockpiles
Finns know this will effectively not be sufficient in itself, so that they have additionally labored onerous on getting ready systematically for crises. “[We try] to verify our society is powerful and may cope with troublesome occasions,” says Niinisto. “Readiness and preparedness are deep down in Finnish minds.”
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Key to that is enlisting Finland’s company sector to play a management position in preparations and in disaster administration. Salonius-Pasternak considers Finland’s capacity to name on its greatest corporations at any time to sort out a nationwide disaster an enormous benefit because it “harnesses the market financial system for a prepper society”.
“The basic concept is: if one firm or sector is impacted, how do you continue to resolve the issue? As an example, how do you feed the nation or hold it in bathroom paper if there’s a blockade within the Baltic Sea?” says Salonius-Pasternak.
Corporations in Finland “get it,” says Kuusela. “The corporate management have been serving within the army. We don’t have enterprise, we don’t have welfare, we don’t have development, if our defence fails. It’s effectively understood.”
The Nationwide Emergency Provide Company (Nesa) helps co-ordinate this community of corporations, however its tasks go effectively past that. It additionally has a stability sheet of €2.5bn, which consists of its strategic stockpiles of six months’ provide of grains similar to wheat and oats, and various kinds of gasoline similar to petrol and diesel in addition to sure undisclosed “strategic property” together with partial possession of the nationwide grid.
Janne Kankanen, chief govt of Nesa, says the company collects a small levy from all fossil gasoline and electrical energy purchases in Finland, giving it “numerous leeway so we now have a capability to reply to various kinds of incidence at very brief discover”.
It will probably buy crucial materials shortly, however also can have a look at totally different sectors and ask, for example, if Finnish farmers will produce sufficient grain this season. Since December, it has been monitoring “additional intensively” the scenario in Ukraine, pivoting from its earlier give attention to the Covid-19 pandemic.
By means of its community of corporations in all sectors, it is ready to “hold and develop a situational consciousness”, Kankanen says, by making certain data flows each methods about what is occurring and potential issues.
“In occasions of disaster like this, it’s after all simpler as a result of we now have the system in place and don’t have to begin constructing one thing from scratch,” he provides. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will result in a dialogue to lift preparedness, Kankanen stresses, and probably improve stockpiles.
The enterprise elite and the army
To make sure senior members of Finland’s institution perceive what’s at stake, they’re invited to take part in what the nation calls Nationwide Defence Programs.
4 occasions a 12 months, a gaggle of a number of dozen politicians, enterprise leaders, and representatives from the church, media and non-governmental organisations meet for a month-long intensive programme involving lectures from senior army officers and authorities officers in addition to a disaster simulation.
Tuppurainen took half in 2014, whereas enterprise leaders similar to Jorma Ollila, former head of Nokia, and Mika Ihamuotila, chair of trend model Marimekko, attended virtually as quickly as they turned chief executives.
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Salonius-Pasternak says it’s “eye-opening” for enterprise leaders to play politicians and vice versa in situations similar to “the water degree of the Baltic Sea rises, we now have to close down our nuclear energy crops, or there’s a plague”. He provides: “Is there an answer to them? In fact there isn’t. The purpose is to get to know individuals, and to seek out out what issues an organization or authorities might have in a disaster.”
In complete, 10,000 individuals have been skilled in such programs over the previous six a long time and most intakes nonetheless meet frequently to debate issues. An extra 60,000 have attended regional defence programs. Salonius-Pasternak provides that the programs are in all probability the simplest ingredient of Finland’s strategy that different international locations might simply emulate.
A extra humdrum however no much less important a part of preparedness is how Finnish authorities, after Russia’s unlawful annexation of Crimea in 2014, combed by all its safety laws to make sure it was match for objective and that “little inexperienced males” couldn’t exploit any loopholes.
Officers inform of painstaking work to make sure legal guidelines are tailored to a disaster scenario, for example permitting corporations in the identical sector to speak to one another in a nationwide emergency with out being accused of working like a cartel. “It may be so simple as ensuring a clause in every regulation comprises one thing like ‘this provision can be suspended in a disaster’,” says one Finnish civil servant.
Finland isn’t just centered on the specter of invasion, however on different types of assault — be they native, such because the poisoning of a water supply or taking out of an influence station, or nationwide, like cyber assaults.
There’s an growing focus so-called hybrid threats, actions which might be typically ambiguous and don’t meet the extent of a full army assault. Teija Tiilikainen, director of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats based mostly in Helsinki, says that Finland must be “extra proactive” in figuring out its vulnerabilities upfront. In 2015, for example, it was caught unaware by Russia sending unlawful migrants over the border.
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“That Russia has began a battle in opposition to a smaller neighbour can solely strengthen the understanding of our vulnerability. Public consciousness about dangers and threats is at a excessive degree,” she says.
Now’s the time for Finland to refocus its efforts, says Niinisto. “These a long time when we now have had full peace and welfare, life has been simpler than it was once. The troubles and dangerous issues have been additional away. Due to that, we now have now a wake-up name to enhance.”
Surviving a pandemic
Earlier than battle broke out in Europe, Finland’s readiness was put to the check by Covid-19. Whereas the consensus is that the nation got here by the pandemic in fine condition, consultants say it uncovered room for enchancment.
The primary problem got here in difficulties within the authorities implementing and speaking selections it had taken effectively. One issue, for example, was in testing arriving passengers at airports. The federal government took a choice nevertheless it turned out 21 totally different actors wanted to be concerned to implement it.
“The primary problem is we have to streamline our disaster administration system,” says Petri Toivonen, secretary-general of Finland’s safety committee. However he provides: “We don’t wish to have a system that’s efficient in opposition to Covid-19 however not in opposition to a army assault.”
A hazard is at all times that authorities rectify issues based mostly on the earlier disaster, however Toivonen says a power of Finland’s strategy is that it helps put together for “black swans”, or surprising occasions, by having as its principal focus defending the “important features” of society.
Salonius-Pasternak says one other problem is that the technique generally overlooks most people, out of a false impression that people needn’t be bothered if the system is in place.
“Folks must have a common concept of what to do. It’s a straightforward factor, and it helps together with your first 72 or 96 hours of a disaster. That is the place there’s a lack, and a few studying to be achieved,” he provides.
There’s little doubt that Finns are unnerved by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one other of its non-Nato neighbours. Helsinki has at all times striven for good neighbourly relations with Russia on account of its lengthy border however that hope has now been shattered.
In the course of the Chilly Battle, Finland’s location compelled it to simply accept neutrality to maintain the Soviet Union at bay, however after becoming a member of the EU in 1995 and drawing nearer to Nato over the previous a long time, there’s a rising sense in Helsinki that membership of the army alliance would cement its standing as an impartial, western nation.
However there may be additionally a perception that the Ukraine battle demonstrates the knowledge of Finland’s strategy all these years. “The easy concept is that it’s a rustic value defending and subsequently you might have a bigger duty, whether or not you’re a CEO or a faculty instructor,” says Salonius-Pasternak. What Ukraine has taught us, he continues, is that “the need to do one thing actually issues. And in case you mix that with, one, the community results of a small nation, and two, preparation, that’s actually highly effective.”
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Underlying all of it is a way that, whilst Ukraine and the Nato debate change a lot within the nation, the one fixed is and might be that Finland will stay a neighbour of Russia.
“Some say we now have fought 32 wars in opposition to Russia, others 42,” says Lindberg, the previous chief of defence. “All I do know is that Russia will at all times be there, and we all know we might be prepared.”
For more than three decades, Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whom Israel killed in an air strike, oversaw the Shia Islamist movement’s transformation from a guerrilla group into the Middle East’s most powerful transnational paramilitary force.
In his 32 years at the helm of Hizbollah, the 64-year-old cleric was credited with making it the pre-eminent force in Iran’s regional network of proxies known as the axis of resistance.
This gave Nasrallah an unrivalled position as both a public face and crucial strategist in the network — “more junior partner than proxy” in the axis, according to Hizbollah expert Amal Saad.
Rarely seen without his clerical garb, Nasrallah was viewed as one of the most important figures in the axis, second only to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, following the US assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
Nasrallah’s forces helped train fighters from Hamas, as well as other members of the Iran axis, including Iraq’s Shia militias and Yemen’s Houthis.
In Lebanon, Hizbollah is referred to as “a state within a state”, with a parallel network of social services that rival those of the government it has worked for decades to undermine.
Nasrallah was reviled by many in Lebanon’s Christian and Sunni communities, who blamed him for eroding the nation’s state institutions, putting Iran’s interests ahead of the country’s and turning his movement’s weapons inwards to quash dissent and opposition.
He was also loathed by many Syrians, after Hizbollah fighters helped president Bashar al-Assad’s regime brutally crush the opposition after civil war erupted in Syria in the wake of a 2011 popular uprising.
All the while, Nasrallah crafted his public image, weaponising his charisma and his battlefield victories to hone a cult of personality that led his supporters to revere him as near-omnipotent.
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His face appears on billboards and key chains, mugs and candlelit shrines. Lebanese routinely trade Nasrallah stickers on WhatsApp while snippets of his speeches are often turned into memes.
The portrait painted by people who knew Nasrallah or met him over the past 40 years is of a strategic thinker with a commanding presence, a man feared and admired in equal measure, revered by Islamist militants and Middle Eastern tyrants.
Very few people met him in person in recent decades. Those who have described Nasrallah as courteous, perceptive and funny.
A powerful orator, he spoke colloquial Arabic — not classical — while a life-long speech impediment, which left him unable to pronounce his Rs, was widely viewed as disarming.
Nasrallah was born on August 31, 1960 in an impoverished Beirut neighbourhood that was home to Christian Armenians, Druze, Shia and Palestinians. He said he was “an observant Muslim at the age of nine”, more preoccupied with his prayers than helping his father in his vegetable shop.
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When Nasrallah was 16, he sent himself to a seminary for aspiring Shia clerics in the Iraqi city of Najaf. He left less than two years later, fixated on resistance to Israel.
While in Najaf, he came under the influence of Abbas Mussawi, a Lebanese cleric just a few years older than him, with whom he would eventually found Hizbollah in the early 1980s.
He climbed quickly up the ranks, forging close ties with the men suspected of plotting some of the group’s earliest terror attacks — including the 1983 bombing of the Beirut barracks housing US and French peacekeepers, which killed at least 360 people.
“After 1982, our youth, years, life and time became part of Hizbollah,” Nasrallah told a Lebanese newspaper in 1993, a few months after he was appointed leader of the militant group following Mussawi’s assassination by Israel.
Unlike other paramilitary leaders, Nasrallah was not known to have personally fought. But his leadership earned him respect among Hizbollah’s ranks as a battlefield commander, particularly after his 18-year-old son Hadi was killed by Israeli commandos in 1997.
“We, Hizbollah’s leadership, do not jealously guard our children,” Nasrallah said the day after Hadi’s death, cementing his reputation as a wartime leader who was willing to make sacrifice for their cause. Nasrallah shared at least three other children with his wife Fatima.
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Nasrallah’s reputation grew regionally when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000. “He achieved what few if any Arab states and armies had done fighting Israel,” Saad said. His reputation was enhanced after Hizbollah fought Israel in a 34-day war in 2006.
When thousands of Hizbollah’s electronic devices detonated this month killing dozens and maiming thousands more in attacks widely blamed on Israel, Nasrallah was said to be unharmed. He never handled electronic devices, which were always heavily screened before being allowed in his vicinity.
He was also rarely known to answer his own phone after Israel was allegedly able to reach him on his personal landline, which exists only on Hizbollah’s parallel telecommunications network.
His frequent speeches were delivered via secure live feed to his legions of followers, broadcast from unknown locations and he sent emissaries to meet his political allies and foes. This helped him deepen his enigmatic aura and the reverence his public had for him.
As Israel has stepped up its attacks on Hizbollah over the past year, it has killed many of the group’s leadership, targeting its field officers before taking aim its senior most command.
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Almost none of the original members of the group’s jihad council, Hizbollah’s top military body that Nasrallah oversaw, is left alive, according to people familiar with the group’s operations.
Many Lebanese remember the destruction wrought the last time Hizbollah went to war with Israel in 2006. In the final hours before the ceasefire took hold, waves of Israeli bombs rained down over Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh. It was considered a last-ditch attempt to kill Nasrallah.
When that war ended, Nasrallah said he would “absolutely not” have launched the attack that triggered the conflict “if I had known . . . that the operation would lead to such a war”.
It was in Dahiyeh where Friday’s strike killed Nasrallah.
Additional reporting by James Shotter in Jerusalem
Floodwaters surround a home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on Friday in Crystal River, Fla.
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Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP
Helene weakened to a post-tropical cyclone on Friday evening but continued to unleash “catastrophic” flooding in the southeastern U.S. and southern Appalachians, forecasters said.
Life-threatening flooding and landslides in parts of southern Appalachia were expected to continue into the evening, the National Hurricane Center said.
Gusty winds were still lashing parts of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Kentucky.
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Carving a northwest path, Helene was expected to slow and then stall over the Tennessee Valley late Friday, according to forecasters.
“The expected slow motion could result in significant flooding over the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, and over the southern Appalachians through the weekend,” the center said in a late morning update.
In an evening update from the National Hurricane Center, maximum sustained winds were moving at 25 mph. The storm made landfall Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend region — the nexus of the Panhandle and peninsula in the state’s northwest — as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph.
Preliminary post-landfall modeling showed the storm surge reached 15 feet above ground level in the Big Bend area near Keaton Beach, Steinhatchee and Horseshoe Beach, the National Weather Service said.
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Flooding concerns have shifted to western North Carolina, which was expected to receive up to 11 inches of rain.
Death toll across five states reaches 44 people
At least 44 people in five stateshave died as a result of the storm, the Associated Press reported. As emergency rescue crews comb through the wreckage, officials in several states said they expected the number of storm-related deaths to climb.
While the worst of the storm is over for many in the Southeast, officials are warning residents to stay vigilant in its aftermath amid hazardous conditions, such as flooded and debris-strewn roads.
The storm surge reached more than 5 feet along the Gulf Coast of Florida Thursday night. Andrew Swan, 31, rode out the storm in Madeira Beach, Fla., watching over a friend’s house. He told WUSF the water rushed into the house up to his chest, and he spent the night sleeping on a kitchen counter with his legs over the stove.
West of Tampa, officials in Pinellas County described the scenes of wreckage there as a “war zone.”
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Five Floridians were confirmed dead in the county, at least two from drownings, the sheriff’s office said.
The high winds and tornadoes were also blamed for several deaths. Gov. Ron DeSantis said one person died on a highway in Tampa from a falling sign. Another person died after a tree fell on their home in Dixie County.
A downed tree is seen along Margret Mitchell Drive in the Buckhead area of Atlanta on Friday.
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The majority of deaths were in Georgia and the Carolinas, several of them the result of falling trees.
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In South Carolina, 19 people died, including two firefighters who died when a tree struck their truck, local officials told the AP.
In Georgia, the death toll was 15, according to a spokesperson for Gov. Brian Kemp. At least two children were among the dead, reported local CBS station 13WMAZ. Two Georgians died in Wheeler County after their trailer was picked up by a tornado, an emergency management official said.
In North Carolina, Helene produced unusually heavy winds — up to 140 mph — on land, the strongest observed in coastal North Carolina since the start of modern meteorological recordkeeping in the 19th century.
Gov. Roy Cooper confirmed
left four people in critical condition
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Virginia had one storm-related death after a tree fell and a building collapsed in Craig County, Gov. Glenn Youngkin said.
Record-breaking rainfall in southern Appalachians
Heavy rains from Helene set a record in Atlanta, which received its highest 48-hour rainfall on record over the past two days. The Georgia Climate Office tweeted on Friday that the area has already seen 11.12 inches of rain, beating a previous record of 9.59 set in 1886. Record keeping started in 1878.
In North Carolina, the rainfall totals Friday afternoon were staggering: 29.58 inches for Busick, N.C.; 24.20 for nearby Mount Mitchell State Park; about 13 inches in Boone, some 55 miles away.
The storm dumped more than 8 inches of rain in Wilmington and wrought serious damage to coastal homes and small buildings, as well as agricultural fields.
Along with floods, the persistent rains have created landslide conditions in western North Carolina, as member station WFAE reported. The National Weather Prediction Center has forecast 6 to 12 inches for the region, well above the landslide condition threshold for the area.
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In Tennessee, over 50 patients and staff were stuck on the roof of Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, as floodwaters rose on Friday morning. By the afternoon, they were finally rescued.
Heavy rains inundate western North Carolina
Rising lakes and rivers as well as flooding from rapid rainfall led officials to close all roads in western North Carolina Friday.
The North Carolina Department of Transportation warned drivers to stay off the roads except for emergencies or efforts to evacuate to higher ground.
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service released an urgent warning through Friday afternoon urging anyone below the Lake Lure Dam near Ashville to evacuate immediately to higher ground, after concerns that the nearly century-old dam could fail.
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Brigadier General Daniel Hibner with the Army Corps of Engineers said dam failures are to be expected in flash flooding events like this one. “It’s not uncommon to see a dam failure in an event like this,” he said at a press briefing. “I would be surprised if there weren’t multiple (dam failures) throughout this area.”
Yet the dam remained intact as of Friday evening. In a 6 p.m. ET update on social media, Rutherford County officials said the lake’s water levels were beginning to recede.
Lake Lure is famous for serving as a backdrop to several scenes in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing.
Helene knocked out power to millions
More than 4 million homes and businesses were without power on Friday afternoon in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, according to poweroutage.us. By nightfall, that number had dipped to about 3.7 million.
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Meanwhile, the NHC warned about the potential for long-lasting power outages in southeastern states.
For those relying on generators for power supply, the consumer safety officials advised people to keep them at least 20 feet away from the home to avoid deadly carbon monoxide poisoning. Improper portable generator use led to more deaths associated with 2020’s Hurricane Laura than the storm itself.
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Kamala Harris promised a fresh clampdown on illegal immigration at the US’s southern frontier as she sought to present a tougher stance on border security with the presidential race entering its final stretch.
On her first campaign trip to the US-Mexico border the vice-president pledged to move beyond measures imposed by the Biden administration, promising “further action” to prevent illegal crossings, tighter asylum measures and “more severe criminal charges” for illegal entrants.
“While we understand that many people are desperate to migrate to the United States our system must be orderly and secure,” she told a crowd in the Arizona city of Douglas.
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The tougher rhetoric comes as the vice-president seeks to shake perceptions of a lax approach to migration and narrow the polling gap with Donald Trump on a crucial electoral issue.
While polls put Harris neck and neck with Trump overall, the former president consistently leads her on the question of border security. A recent NBC News poll gave Trump a 21-point advantage among voters on the topic.
The number of people crossing the country’s southern frontier surged to record levels under Joe Biden, peaking last December. But apprehensions have since fallen sharply after the president introduced an executive order including emergency measures to shutter the frontier.
Trump has made immigration a focal point of his campaign, accusing new arrivals of “poisoning the blood of our country” and proposing a crackdown involving militarised mass deportations.
Harris on Friday sought to push back, repeatedly pointing to the former president’s efforts to scuttle a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year, accusing him of an “abdication of leadership” and of prioritising politics over real solutions.
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“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said of the bill. “He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill. He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Harris said that if elected she would work with Congress to pass the border security bill, as well as unspecified actions to keep the border closed between legal crossing points and barring some illegal entrants from being able to claim asylum.
Trump has sought to tie Harris to the surge in illegal border crossings during Biden’s term in office, dubbing her the president’s “border tsar”, a label her campaign has rejected.
A Trump campaign spokesperson on Friday dismissed Harris’s border visit as a “desperate attempt to fool Americans into forgetting the chaos and devastation she has unleashed over her four years as border tsar”.
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