In another policy reversal, Vice President Kamala Harris says she now supports building a border wall after she and President Joe Biden opposed doing so for nearly four years and she vehemently opposed it while she was a U.S. senator.
The majority of Americans polled don’t believe her, with only 32% saying she’s been consistent on the issue of immigration, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll.
Harris continues to claim in remarks that she’d sign a Senate border bill into law, which went nowhere in the Democrat-controlled Senate, that allocates $650 million to border wall construction.
This is after the Biden-Harris administration halted border wall construction in January 2021 and has been fighting a lawsuit against Texas over it ever since, only recently losing in federal court. The administration has fought dozens of lawsuits over border policies against half of the U.S. states, many led by Texas.
While the Senate bill was being negotiated, Harris, Biden’s designated “border czar,” wasn’t involved, according to multiple news reports.
Harris has long openly opposed border wall construction.
After joining the U.S. Senate, in April 2017, she said former President Donald Trump’s border wall was a “stupid use of money. I will block any funding for it.”
In April 2018, Harris urged the Senate Appropriations Committee to reject Trump’s fiscal 2019 funding request to build a “costly and ineffective border wall,” hire new Border Patrol agents, and more U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel.
She urged the committee to “reduce funding for the administration’s reckless immigration enforcement operations,” including reducing funding for beds in the federal immigration detention system, which agents argue is critical to holding the most violent criminals before deporting them.
Harris has more than once called for abolishing ICE, The Center Square reported.
She also strongly urged the committee “to reject any funding for President Trump’s border wall,” saying “a wall, in fact, would do little to aid federal drug interdiction efforts.”
When she first ran for president in 2019, she described Trump’s border wall as a “medieval vanity project.” As vice president, in February 2020, she posted on Facebook, “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”
Multiple news outlets recently called out Harris for her policy reversal. “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,” Axios reported.
One USA Today columnist said she thought Harris’ claim was from The Babylon Bee, a satirical website, “but it wasn’t satire.” Harris “decided she supports one of former President Donald Trump’s signature ideas − and one despised by progressives.”
CNN’s KFile Investigates searched through Harris social media posts from 2017 and found that she criticized Trump’s wall more than 50 times, referring to it as “stupid” and “useless.”
In a campaign ad, Harris claimed to prosecute Mexican cartels and fight border crime but was lambasted by California sheriffs saying they didn’t support her. An image of the border wall was prominently displayed in the ad. But it was a section that Trump built, CNN reported, “in Sasabe, Arizona, in an area where there had not previously been border wall. The other walls feature signs that they were Trump-era walls, such as so-called anti-climbing plates that were built during the Trump years.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has argued if Harris or Biden were serious about border security, they’d drop their fight with Texas in multiple border-related lawsuits including three before the Fifth Circuit. The administration is still trying to halt Texas’s border security law, SB 4, and halt Texas’ construction of concertina wire and marine barriers.
Harris would also reimburse Texas the roughly $12 billion Texas taxpayers have paid for border security efforts through Abbott’s Operation Lone Star and respond to his invitations to come to the border and see the crisis for herself, Abbott has argued.
Within months of the Biden-Harris administration halting border wall construction, Abbott announced Texas would build its own border wall in June 2021. By December 2021, construction began on state land in Rio Grande City.
Texas’ wall is steel and constructed similarly to the Trump wall. The first part was built and erected by a local Texas company, McAllen Strong Steel.
Unlike the federal government, which left millions of dollars of steel on the ground to rust, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, Texas construction was implemented in record time and with accountability, state officials argue. Texas Facilities Commission Chair Steven Alvis said operations that would have normally taken two-to-three months took two-to-three days because of Texas ingenuity and hard work, The Center Square reported.
On Sunday, Abbott posted a video of ongoing Texas border wall construction in Maverick County, saying, “Texas is fighting on the frontlines of the Biden-Harris border crisis.”
Before Labor Day, he posted a video of border wall construction in Starr County, saying, “Texas is the ONLY state in U.S. history to build our own border wall. We will protect Texans and Americans from the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration.”
