Harris flip-flops on building the border wall
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to reporters in El Paso during a visit to the border in 2021. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/ AFP via Getty Images
If she's elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border — a project she once opposed and called "un-American" during the Trump administration.
Why it matters: It's the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past liberal positions such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking — proposals that aides say she now is against.
- Harris is embracing a more hawkish immigration policy as Donald Trump's campaign spends tens of millions of dollars attacking her about the border.
- But she still has significant differences with Trump on immigration, opposing his approach to family separation and his plans for mass deportations.
Driving the news: In her speech to the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris said she would sign the recent bipartisan border security bill — which Trump had ordered his allies to kill, fearing it would help Democrats in the November elections.
- That bill, negotiated by senators such as James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), requires hundreds of millions of dollars of unspent funds to be used to continue building a wall on the border.
- "It requires the Trump border wall," Lankford told Axios. "It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here's where it will be built. Here's how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction."
- Harris' campaign says the border deal is a whole lot more than continuation of wall funding — and a tiny fraction of what Trump has proposed.
Lankford's office estimated the legislation would spend $650 million on a wall, down from the $18 billion Trump requested in 2018.
- The bill, which Murphy described as a "compromise" also included provisions with more money for asylum lawyers and judges for the overloaded immigration system. It also gave the president the authority to shut down the border if more than an average of 5,000 migrants crossed per day.
The other side: Harris advisers note that the bipartisan border proposal didn't include any new money to continue building the wall.
- It just extended the timeline to spend funds that had been appropriated during Trump's last year as president, they say, although the legislation has new restrictions to ensure the money is spent on barriers.
Flashback: In declaring her candidacy in her first run for president in 2019, Harris called the wall Trump's "medieval vanity project" that wasn't going to stop transnational gangs from entering the U.S.
- In February 2020, Harris wrote on Facebook that "Trump's border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won't make us any safer."
- In April 2017, soon after joining the Senate, Harris said the wall was a "stupid use of money. I will block any funding for it."
Between the lines: Lankford said he was surprised with Harris' full embrace of the border bill this year.
- He told Axios that Harris wasn't involved in the months-long negotiations: "We never saw any vice president staff here. ... She was a Johnny-come-never."
- "I know she's talking about it now, but she wasn't talking about it at all before."
When the bill was released, Murphy called it an "aggressive" plan but didn't emphasize the money for the wall.
- "We're creating bold new tools to get control of the border for the first time in a long time," he said in February. "But our bill does not deviate from our nation's core values."
- President Biden — then the presumed Democratic nominee — lambasted Trump for demanding Republicans kill the compromise, calling it pure politics. "He feels it would be a political win for me, and a political loser for him," Biden said in his State of the Union address.
- But some Democrats also criticized Biden for embracing conservative and restrictive policies on immigration that were included in the bill.
- Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat from Harris' home state of California, opposed the bill and said it "fails to provide relief for a single Dreamer, a single farmworker, a single essential worker or long-term resident."
Zoom in: Beyond embracing the bipartisan bill, Harris' campaign has portrayed her as an immigration hardliner in ads.
- One Harris TV ad frames her time as California's attorney general as that of a "border state prosecutor," and includes images of the border wall.
- In another, Harris' team highlights her support of boosting the number of Border Patrol agents.
- Most of Trump campaign ads have attacked Harris for the Biden administration's struggle to deal with waves of migrants crossing the border.
The bottom line: Like the wall itself, Harris' changes on border policy reflect how Trump has shifted the political debate on immigration during the past decade.
