Kamala Harris is now, and for the next 50-something days, officially a border hawk.
It’s not hard to understand why. A recent Pew survey showed that six in ten voters say that immigration is very important to their vote. Over eight in ten Republicans say as much, and 39 percent of Harris voters say the same. President Biden’s approval ratings have been in the tank on this issue since he opened the floodgates, and Harris had an important role in addressing the supposed root causes of the problem in Latin America.
With all this in mind, Harris sought to minimize her vulnerability on the issue at the Tuesday debate, very unpersuasively. Harris claimed to be “the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings,” which is true only insofar as she was the only prosecutor on the stage. In fact, as a prosecutor, Harris was soft on criminal illegal immigrants. She supported San Francisco’s sanctuary-city policy. That policy meant that Edwin Ramos was not referred to federal authorities after being arrested several times as a juvenile for violent assaults. He would go on to commit a triple homicide. Her “Back on Track” program allowed nonviolent offenders to have their records expunged if they received job training. The loophole allowed illegal immigrants to access that job training. One beneficiary of the program, Alexander Izaguirre, robbed a woman and mowed her down with an SUV, fracturing his victim’s skull.
Harris noted that she had supported a Senate compromise bill drafted by Republican James Lankford, which Trump opposed. She said the bill “would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border” and “would have put more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking in guns, drugs, and human beings.” It’s true that the bill included pay and personnel increases, which helped it win an endorsement from ICE, but the bill would have also formalized and regularized the Biden administration’s negligent practice of deferring asylum seekers away from adversarial hearings with judges and waving them into our country after a short questionnaire with an asylum officer. It dangled the prospect of expedited work permits to potential migrants. Ultimately, the bill did not oblige the Biden administration to forbid a single migrant from entering the country if it didn’t already want to do so.
At least the Lankford bill was faux-toughness. The same wasn’t true of a bill introduced by Senator Kamala Harris in 2019 that would have taken $220 million from the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE and given it to NGOs that would provide illegal aliens with a social worker — usually, an immigrant-rights activist. The bill would have forbidden ICE from arresting or deporting any criminal alien who was seeking to sponsor an “unaccompanied alien minor.” That is, every violent criminal would have received a get-out-of-deportation card by simply naming a foreign minor. The Harris bill didn’t pass, but a version of this provision got folded into a DHS funding bill, and HHS saw the eminently predictable increase in reports of abuse and trafficking of migrant children. In the wild anti-law-and-order days in which she first tried running for president, Harris compared ICE to the Ku Klux Klan and suggested dismantling the agency altogether.
Although she has hinted at building a wall in various campaign commercials, in 2020 Harris was a co-sponsor of an amendment to a DOD appropriations bill, titled “Prohibition on Constructing Walls, Fences, or Associated Roads on Southern Border of United States,” which banned the secretary of defense from authorizing any funds for, you guessed it, wall-building.
At the debate, Kamala Harris was asked about her changed position on decriminalizing border crossings; she elected not to respond. But she’s been nothing but consistent throughout her career — at every turn she has tried to make it harder to enforce normal laws distinguishing citizens from illegally resident aliens. In 2019, she co-sponsored legislation creating a presumption that aliens should be released and not held until having an immigration hearing, even if they had a criminal charge pending. In 2017, she co-sponsored a bill that would have prevented any immigration enforcement action at “sensitive locations,” including health-care facilities, schools, or any “after-school event, domestic violence shelter, or courthouse.” In 2018, she co-sponsored a bill that would have impeded the removal of any illegal immigrant, even with a criminal background, with minor children.
In the debate and in a few commercials, Kamala Harris has gestured toward the normal enforcement of our laws at the border. But in her career as a prosecutor and a senator, she has done everything possible to make it easier to enter this country, and harder for this nation’s institutions, whether the police or the courts, to remove aliens that have no right to stay.