Immigration is a top issue on voters’ minds. When people talk about President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s handling of immigration, they usually say something like: Record numbers of migrants poured across the border over the past three years, and Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris ignored the crisis until recently. They were weak on the border. Or worse, inept.

I wanted to know how the president and vice president could mess this up so badly. What in the world were they doing?

The Opinion video above tells the little-known story of how Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris worked behind the scenes to get the border crisis under control. I found that they acted strategically, out of the spotlight, since the earliest days of the administration. They even bucked their own party and fulfilled Republican wishes, though they’ve gotten little credit for it.

Their hard work finally paid off when illegal crossings dropped significantly this year.

In politics, there’s the story that gets told in public, and then there’s what really happened behind closed doors. In this case, those two narratives are worlds apart. And Ms. Harris is paying for it. When polled, a majority of voters said they believed Donald Trump would handle immigration better than Ms. Harris.

If voters knew how Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris actually handled the border crisis, they’d most likely have a different opinion of which candidate could be trusted on this cornerstone issue.

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