Team Kamala Says She's Tough on the Border. But What's Her History?

Debra Saunders on Aug 1, 2024

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Kamala Harris wants Americans to believe that she is not a progressive. Now that she's heading the Democratic ticket, she's all for securing the border, after all.

For many of us who've known her since the days she served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, that's a tall order. Harris has a history of embracing the most far-left policies possible, abandoning them when they become inconvenient and then maybe backtracking.

As San Francisco district attorney, Harris famously refused to charge an accused cop-killer for a capital crime because she was against capital punishment. But when she ran for California attorney general, she said she would uphold California's death penalty.

So when the presumptive Democratic nominee says she "will actually work to solve the problem" at the Southwest border, as she told supporters at a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, don't believe it.

In 2019, during a Democratic presidential debate, Harris said she opposed former President Barack Obama's Secure Communities program, which forwarded fingerprints taken by local law enforcement to ICE, because she feared that undocumented migrants might not report crimes, such as rape. She wasn't tough; she was waffling.

While her campaign argues that the veep now supports "the toughest deal to secure the border in decades," and that Trump "is trying to stop her," it's hard to see how a Democrat who opposed Obama's immigration enforcement efforts is tough on the border.

(Yes, Trump told elected Republicans to vote against the bill Team Harris mentioned, but the Biden administration could have pushed through a big border bill during the president's first two years, when Democrats also controlled Congress. Never happened.)

Harris supported San Francisco's sanctuary city policy, which protected illegal migrant drug dealers and gang-bangers from deportation. Not tough.

Indeed, when Harris was district attorney, her office enrolled some illegal immigrants facing criminal charges in Back on Track, a job-training program -- even though they could not work legally in the United States.

When an illegal immigrant from Honduras who enrolled in Back on Track snatched a woman's purse, Harris told the Los Angeles Times that enforcing federal immigration law was not the job of local authorities.

In 2009, when it came to light that an undocumented migrant who had pleaded guilty to a drug felony was enrolled in Back on Track, Harris blamed a design flaw.

After the bad press, Harris' office announced it would not enroll new undocumented migrants in the jobs program.

But she did not try to discover how many unemployable migrants remained in Back on Track, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

While Harris did not utter the name of her boss once during her 20-minute speech, she campaigned by Joe Biden's side throughout 2020. And I don't think even Biden would say he has been tough on the border.

"I think it's safe to say 6 million people illegally have gotten into the United States under Biden, most of them let in," Mark Krikorian, executive director of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies, told me, as he guesstimated a statistic that is hard to nail down.

Over the past 10 or 15 years, Krikorian observed, the Democratic Party has radicalized, and "de facto unlimited immigration is now a litmus test" for its candidates.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.

----