Democrats are painting Kamala Harris as a tough-minded border enforcer — even though the data and Republican voices say she “ran away” from the task of guarding Americans’ southern border.
“For 20 years, Mayor Harris has been tough as nails when it comes to securing our border,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told the convention attendees. “When she was the California prosecutor, she went after drug smugglers, human traffickers — she put 100 gang members away in a sweep.”
“I walked underground tunnels between the United States and Mexico on that border with law enforcement officers,” Harris said in a video displayed at the convention:
I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels, and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won. So here is my pledge to you: As President, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed, and I will sign it into law and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like.
But Harris has avoided the issue for three years, and in March 2021, she even refocused President Joe Biden’s request that she take a larger role in “stemming” migration from multiple countries to the U.S. border. In response, she said should we focus on “long-term causes.”
Biden’s offer prompted D.C. media outlets to describe her as Biden’s “Border Czar.”
But Harris visited Central America once, while Biden’s border chief welcomed 10 million additional legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants. That invited migrant flood has cut wages, driven up housing prices, and shifted wealth from working families towards older investors on Wall Street.
That easy-migration policy is also enshrined in Harris’s 2024 platform. “America is a nation of immigrants …[and] must continue to be a beacon of hope and opportunity” for foreigners, says the platform.
Even her liberal allies say that she has failed to fight for secure borders.
Axios reported on August 19:
There was also resentment and a belief among some [of President Joe Biden’s top aides] that she ran away from responsibility — particularly on immigration — rather than trying to tackle a complex issue. Biden felt that as vice president, he embraced tough assignments early on, including withdrawal from Iraq and implementing the stimulus package.
“Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas, said he tried to reach out to her team to talk about border security but his requests were never answered,” New York Times reported on August 18. The report continued:
“I don’t want to say I told you so, but it did happen the way I said it would happen,” Mr. Cuellar said of the record levels of illegal border crossings earlier in Mr. Biden’s presidency. “I think anyone that’s dealt with this issue knows that it’s a very difficult issue, and I do think she distanced herself.”
The New York Times also noted that Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, tried to find evidence that Harris had cared about the issue while she was Attorney General in California:
He recalled trying to find photographs of her visiting the border when she was California attorney general in hopes of rebutting Republican critics. “We wanted to try to find proof that she’d been there during that, but never could find pictures or anything,” he said.
The Associated Press claimed Harris prioritized a “long-term” approach to the “root causes” of migration, saying that “presented with the rise in border crossings, Kamala Harris chose a long-term approach to the problem.”
Harris “resisted taking ownership of immigration … Harris bristled at the implication that she had a direct role to play in fixing the border,” Politico reported August 10.
