But those successes only underlined the scale of the gulf in economic opportunity between the United States and Central America, and how policies to narrow that gulf could take years or even generations to show results.
Rather than develop ways to turn away or detain migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Ms. Harris's work included encouraging a Japan-based auto parts plant, Yazaki, to build a $10 million plant in a western Guatemalan region that sees high rates of migration and pushing a Swiss-based coffee company to increase procurement by more than $100 million in a region rich with coffee beans.
She convened leaders from dozens of companies, helping to raise more than $5 billion in private and public funds.
"Not a huge amount, but it ain't chicken feed and that links to jobs," said Mark Schneider, who worked with Latin American and Caribbean nations as a senior official at the United States Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration.
Jonathan Fantini-Porter, the chief executive of the Partnership for Central America, the public-private partnership Ms. Harris helped lead, said the money had led to 30,000 jobs, with another 60,000 on the way as factories are constructed.
Ricardo Ziga, who served as State Department's special envoy for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, said Ms. Harris was essential in bringing together Latin American and American business leaders to drive investment in Central America.
Less than a week into her role, Mr. Ziga recalled, Ms. Harris sat with members of the national security team and economists from the Treasury Department. After a round of introductions, she quickly got into probing the personalities of the Latin American leaders with whom she would be interacting.
Mr. Ziga said he later watched her put the information she had collected into practice. She also pushed Central American governments to work with the United States to create a program where refugees could apply for protection within the region.
It's quite revealing watching Harris critics become apoplectic when confronted with the long-documented truth about what Biden tasked his VP with undertaking as it regarded unregulated migration during the height of the covid crisis. All of this was set out in