WASHINGTON — Rep. James Comer is shifting the focus of his oversight duties from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has shot ahead of Donald Trump in polling just three weeks since the beginning of her White House candidacy.

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee is seeking to probe Harris’ role in the immigration crisis on the southern border, requesting communications between Border Protection officials and the office of the vice president. Early in the Biden administration, Harris was tasked with pinpointing the causes of Central American migration to the United States.

“She failed miserably at the border,” the Kentucky Republican said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday night. “There’s no evidence that she did anything other than invite more people to come across the border.

“When you make it clear that you’re not going to prosecute anyone for violating the law for illegally crossing our border, that’s an open invitation to cross our border. That’s what’s happened under Kamala Harris,” Comer added.

Democrats have panned the timing of Comer’s probe — just over 80 days from Election Day — but the Harris campaign is taking the issue seriously and the candidate addressed it at a campaign stop in Arizona last week.

“We know our immigration system is broken and we know what it takes to fix it: comprehensive reform. That includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship,” Harris said in Glendale, Ariz.

A Harris campaign ad, which debuted following the launch of Comer’s probe, frames her as a “border state prosecutor” from California and she has pledged to sign legislation that would make it easier to deport undocumented immigrants, regardless of their asylum claims.

Illegal border crossings have been consistently dropping this year, according to Customs and Border Protection data. Agents apprehended 56,000 migrants on the southern border in July, the lowest number of the Biden presidency.

But Comer is hoping to unearth how Harris handled the crisis at the advent of the Biden administration, when she was tasked with leading diplomatic efforts with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to figure out the root causes of migration from those countries.

“Vice President Harris’ root causes approach to solving the border crisis has been an abject failure as encounters at the southwest border remain high,” Comer wrote in his letter to Troy Miller, a senior official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

On Fox, Comer said he wants a number to show how much the situation at the border has cost U.S. taxpayers.

“This has had a huge impact on Medicaid because many of these people when they cross the border, they get free health care. That’s what Medicaid is — it’s free health care,” Comer charged. “It costs money on the public school systems for these kids to be stuck in public schools that are already behind when they get here.”

Steven A. Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, testified before a House committee this summer that undocumented immigrants receive $42 billion in benefits from government programs, or about 4% of the total cash in Medicaid, housing and food programs analyzed.

But a July report from the Congressional Budget Office found that immigration tends to be a net-positive for the overall economy, because even undocumented migrants typically pay more in income and payroll taxes than they receive in federal benefits.

It’s unclear what Comer’s request will yield and if it will produce any hearings when Congress returns from its August recess.

Comer’s investigative effort to impeach Biden collapsed last spring when Republicans failed to unify around a smoking gun that implicated the president of wrongdoing.

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