Vice President Kamala Harris, tasked by the president with addressing the root causes of the migrant surge at the southwest border, is planning to travel to Mexico and Guatemala, she said Wednesday.

Speaking before a virtual roundtable with experts on the issues facing the region, Harris did not provide further details about the trip, saying the planning is in the works and that she hopes to visit the countries “as soon as possible,” noting there are coronavirus-related restrictions to navigate around. It would be her first foreign trip as vice president.

“What we are focused on is working directly with these countries to determine how we can deter travel, deter migrants from making the journey,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday. 

Harris is focusing on the Northern Triangle countries of  Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and she has no plans to visit the border itself, noting that President Joe Biden has placed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in charge of tackling that part of the problem.

“We must address the symptoms, and that is what is happening with the team of folks who are working on the border, led by Ali Mayorkas,” Harris said. “But we also have to deal with the root causes. Otherwise we are just in a perpetual system of only dealing with the symptoms.”

Harris said that most people don’t want to leave their home countries but are propelled to seek asylum in the U.S. because they are fleeing danger or there are a lack of opportunities to put food on the table or a roof over their families.

“The focus that we are bringing to our work in the Northern Triangle is really about assessing and figuring out what we might do to encourage economic development, addressing what we know is present there in terms of the need to address issues that relate to integrity of government, rule of law and corruption, but looking at it also in the context of what we can do with the resources we have to assist on issues like agriculture, farming, water irrigation,” she said.

The vice president said the problems in the region have been years in the making and will not be solved overnight.

“The work we have to do is going to require a commitment that is continuous,” she said.

The decision for Harris not to visit the border is certain to fuel criticism from Republicans that the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to address the large increase in migration at the border. Harris and Biden both have been hammered by GOP lawmakers for not visiting the border, even as jarring photos of minors held in overcrowded detention centers drew fresh attention to the issue.

Biden’s “focus is on solutions is on opening up additional facilities, which we have done a great deal of in the last couple of weeks, on moving kids out of the Border Patrol facilities as quickly as possible into these shelters, which we've seen some progress on and the numbers that have been released by the Department of Homeland Security,” Psaki said.  

The president has dispatched a number of top aides to evaluate the situation at the border instead.

Indeed, Republican lawmakers returning from a border trip blamed the Biden administration for the problems, arguing for a return to Trump-era policies. They said the president and vice president need to go to the border to see firsthand the migrant surge.

“He can stop this today,” said Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the GOP whip. “Vice President Harris needs to go down to the border and see this for herself.”

The increase in migration to the U.S. has become one of Biden’s biggest challenges in the early months of his administration.

In March, a record number of unaccompanied children attempted to cross the border, and the Border Patrol saw its largest number of encounters overall with migrants on the southern border — just under 170,000 — in two decades.

Numbers grew sharply during Trump’s final year in office but further accelerated under Biden, who quickly ended many of his predecessor’s policies, including one that made asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for court hearings in the U.S.