Editorial: It's too late for Kamala Harris to play tough on immigration

Vice President Kamala Harris ticked off her presidential campaign checklist with a visit to the southern border last week. She talked with members of the Border Patrol and made boilerplate promises of getting tough on immigration.

Sorry, Kamala, you don’t get points for promising to close the barn door after the horses have escaped.

Harris, as a presidential candidate at a 2019 primary debate, raised her hand when asked if she supported “decriminalizing” border crossings to make unlawful crossings only a civil offense. She no longer supports that view, she told CNN.

Now, however, “I was attorney general of a border state for two terms. I saw the violence and chaos that transnational criminal organizations cause and the heartbreak and loss from the spread of their illicit drugs,” Harris said, adding that going after such gangs would be a priority if she is elected president, NBC News reported of her border speech.

Why isn’t going after these gangs a priority of the Biden Administration now?

Harris doesn’t have to harken back to her time as California AG for examples of criminal illegal immigrants and their effect on communities. She just needs to expand her campaign stops from rallies and auditoriums to some of the communities damaged by the lax immigration policies of the Biden Administration, of which she is part.

Harris could drop in on New York City’s infamous “Market of Sweethearts” in Queens where the New York City Police raided a migrant-run brothel last week, the New York Post reported.

“This brothel was the worst of the worst,” Democratic district leader Hiram Monserrate said. The former state lawmaker added that the sex workers are forced into prostitution to pay off debts of up to $50,000 to human traffickers.

“The migrant crisis has contributed to the crime — the sheer number who came here in a short period of time. Some of them are part of organized crime rings,” Monserrate said.

Or Harris could just swing by the office of deputy director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Patrick J. Lechleitner. He provided some sobering data recently: As of July, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket. More than 100,000 illegal immigrants — convicted criminals and those pending criminal charges — who have been charged with assault are not being detained.

Harris was a fan of “sanctuary” laws, at least back in the day. In 2015, as AG, she sent a letter to U.S. senators opposing the Stop Sanctuary Policies and Protect Americans Act.

“ ‘Sanctuary’ policies can end up shielding dangerous criminals, who often victimize those same communities,” Lechleitner said in a letter to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas.

If Harris wants to see the result of sanctuary policies and the administration’s lax immigration stance, she should head to Nantucket. That’s where ICE Boston agents arrested five illegal immigrants earlier this month, including the apprehension of an MS-13 gang member. That arrest came a day after a noncitizen was charged with a sex crime against a Nantucket resident and two days after ICE apprehended three other illegal immigrants on the island.

These are far from isolated cases. They are the consequences of the Biden Administration’s immigration policies. Harris can do her best to flip the script on the campaign trail, but the communities who live with these consequences are far from joyful.

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