What does border czar Kamala Harris’s history suggest about what she would do as president?
In an Oct. 7 interview, 60 Minutes’s Bill Whitaker asked Harris, “Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did? Was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?”
Harris snapped, “I think the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem.”
“OK, but the numbers did quadruple,” Whitaker countered.
“And the numbers today because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half,” she asserted.
That “does not give the full picture,” even according to a “fake news” fact check. Former U.S. Immigration Court Judge and Immigration Reform Law Institute Director of Investigations Matt O’Brien told the Washington Examiner, “If illegal border crossings are down, it’s only because the Biden-Harris team allowed aliens to schedule their unlawful entry on the CBP One app, waiving them in unchallenged. That’s like claiming you’ve reduced murders by refusing to prosecute homicides.”
Harris has a history here.
For instance, Amanda Kiefer charged that Harris spoke loud but carried a small stick years ago as San Francisco district attorney, calling Harris’s current claims to have been a tough prosecutor “laughable.” In 2008, an illegal immigrant arrested earlier on drug charges but released as part of a new program Harris launched attacked Kiefer. Harris’s “Back on Track” program allowed illegal immigrant drug dealers to enter job training to escape prison. One beneficiary, Alexander Izaguirre, stole Kiefer’s purse and jumped into a waiting SUV, whose driver attempted to run Kiefer down, leaving her with a fractured skull.
In Harris’s inaugural speech as California attorney general, she slammed “organized violent criminal gangs” that “present an expanding threat across borders.” Yet as attorney general, Harris issued a bulletin “informing all California law enforcement that they did not have to comply with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detainers” — helping those same border-crossing organized violent criminal gang members escape deportation.
Similarly, Harris bragged during her debate with former President Donald Trump about being “the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings.” Such an image is reinforced by a photo of Harris in front of the border wall near the outset of her tenure as the Golden State’s attorney general.
That said, according to another media fact check, “Harris was not there to support the fence or border wall construction. Rather, the photo op was part of [her] tour of the operations of a multi-agency crackdown on international drug cartels. Harris has opposed greater border wall funding, frequently calling such moves misguided.”
“Misguided” is an understatement. As a senator from California, Harris knocked “Trump’s border wall” as “a complete waste of taxpayer money [that] won’t make us any safer.” Harris was one of only three Democratic votes against a deal granting then-President Donald Trump border wall funding while giving Democrats an unlawful Obama-era amnesty program she otherwise supported.
Days later, Harris called the wall “un-American.”
“I’m not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances,” Harris underscored, dubbing it a “medieval vanity project.” Harris flagged the funding fight over the wall as a “distraction from the fact that you’ve got [then-special counsel Robert] Mueller investigating” and insisted that if illegal immigrants want to break into America, “that wall ain’t going to stop them [uncontrollable cackling]. Let’s actually be honest about that.”
Then-Sen. Harris did not confine herself to wall critiques. During a December 2017 debate about illegally allowing illegal immigrant youth to stay in the United States, Harris famously grinched, “And when we sing happy tunes and wish each other ‘Merry Christmas’ — these children are not going to have a merry Christmas. How dare we speak ‘Merry Christmas’?” In a similar spirit, Harris not only “led efforts” to decrease ICE detention dollars and suggested abolishing the agency and starting “from scratch,” but she also compared ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan.
Former acting ICE Director Thomas Homan told the Washington Examiner, “It’s shocking for anyone who wants to be commander in chief to falsely vilify the men and women who carry a gun and wear a Kevlar vest to enforce the laws that protect this country — which is exactly what Congress enacted them to do.”
As a presidential candidate, Harris advocated illegally allowing a preferred class of aliens to remain in America. She proposed unilaterally gifting such aliens a “path to citizenship” and to voting. She promised to “slash detention by at least 50% and halt funding for the construction or expansion of new facilities.” Yet Harris also backed taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for illegal immigrants still in those facilities.
Under Vice President and border czar Harris, illegal immigration did not just “quadruple,” as Whitaker charged. From the Trump-Pence low to the Biden-Harris high, illegal immigrant border encounters soared a towering 2,600%.
Worse, the Biden-Harris administration acknowledges it allowed criminal aliens released into the country to skyrocket to 425,431, including 13,099 convicted of murder and 15,811 convicted of rape and sexual assault.
The administration cavils that those accumulated over decades and include many under other jurisdictions or incarcerated elsewhere. Moreover, it claims, past administrations released the “vast majority” of them — mysteriously, given that nondetained criminal aliens nearly doubled from 3.7 million in the Biden-Harris administration’s first year to over 7 million last year.
Chad Wolf, Trump’s Homeland Security secretary and now executive director of America First Policy Institute, pointed out the Biden-Harris team is “walking the numbers back because it’s not a good look for the administration” to be releasing this cataclysmic cacophony of criminals, “the vast majority” of which “are in American communities today.”
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Now, Harris blames the border debacle on Trump, claiming he torpedoed President Joe Biden’s border bill, which she called “the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades,” though Harris herself opposed as too strong a bill to trade wall funding for amnesty. Indeed, Wolf countered, “Operators left and right say the [Biden-backed] bill would have been a failure.”
Harris’s histrionic history suggests no matter how tough she talks on border security, she walks a different walk.
Christopher C. Hull, Ph.D., is president of Issue Management, a public affairs firm that does grassroots and advocacy work, including on national security. He was previously chief of staff to a member of the House of Representatives.
