No matter what she might spin now that she is the Democratic Party’s heir apparent, Kamala Harris made her views on immigration clear many times: Complete open borders.
During a Senate confirmation hearing of President Trump’s nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ronald Vitiello, she legitimized leftist militant narratives in accusing the agency of racism.
“Certain communities saw ICE as comparable to the Ku Klux Klan for administering its power in a way that is causing fear and intimidation, particularly among immigrants and specifically among immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America,” Harris accused.
Harris told MSNBC in 2019 that the United States should “probably think about starting from scratch” on enforcing immigration laws, while a spokesperson for Harris said the senator was weighing “a complete overhaul of the agency, mission, culture, operations.”
None of this could be said to be opportunistic, either.
Back in 2015, while serving as California’s Attorney General, Harris told KCBS-TV in Los Angeles that “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal. I know what a criminal looks like who’s committing a crime. An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.”
In fact, illegally crossing the southern border is a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison for a first offense and more time with subsequent violations.
She was one of the candidates who raised a hand at another debate when asked if she supported decriminalizing illegal crossings.
In a 2019 interview with National Public Radio, candidate Harris expressed a willingness to declare all illegal border crossers refugees from unconfirmable claimed political violence, even if that meant ignoring the law, despite well-known reporting that millions let inside on such claims run and disappear into the nation’s permanent illegal immigrant population.
“I disagree with any policy that would turn America’s back on people who are fleeing harm. I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for,” she said. “And so, I would not enforce a law [emphasis added] that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge.”
Harris’ presidential campaign website took a page from Antifa and BLM ideology handbooks about dismantling immigration enforcement, declaring her belief that “we must fundamentally overhaul our immigration enforcement policies and practices — they are cruel and out of control. She promised to “increase oversight” of agencies like the U.S. Border Patrol once she commands the agency.
Expect claims from Harris supporters that, well this was a primary campaign intended to appeal to the party base. She didn’t really mean any of it.
Harris kept her feelings close to the vest after becoming vice president, but repeatedly lied and obfuscated on whether a mass migration crisis was underway at the southern border for years, refusing to visit it and, when she finally did under pressure, staying indoors in controlled environments with the TV cameras.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent some illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard to make a political point in September 2022, Harris was quoted insisting the administration’s policies had “closed” the border when hundreds of thousands had just crossed in.
Local TV quoted one of the Martha Vinyard immigrants refuting the vice president’s absurd claim.
“It’s open, not closed. The border is open,” the gentleman responded when asked about Harris’ claim that it was closed. “Everybody believes the border is open. It’s open because . . . we entered! We come in. Free. No problem.”
As Vice President, Harris has regularly blamed “root causes” and “climate change” for the vast influx that began right after she and Biden took office and implemented an extremist vision from the burning streets of blue cities.
Immigration was all so very “complex,” Harris explained during a state visit to Central America to get the strategy up and running.
So complex that Harris’ answer to it is . . . nothing.
Whatever Democratic Party nominee might float about her plans for border security over the next four months, American voters who disagree with what she and Biden did at the border should know that, in her case, past definitely is prologue.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”