Vice President Kamala Harris has reversed her position on spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a wall along the southern border, Axios reported Tuesday.
Harris is now in favor of building a wall after being attacked repeatedly by former President Donald Trump for presiding over an unprecedented surge in illegal immigration to the U.S. as the Biden administration’s unofficial “border czar,” according to Axios. Prior to her second run for the presidency, Harris had called the border wall “un-American,” a “stupid waste of money” and Trump’s “medieval vanity project.”
Harris now backs the bipartisan border bill proposed in February, which would require hundreds of millions of unspent public dollars to be spent on further construction of a border wall, according to Axios. The office of Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, one of the lawmakers who negotiated the bill, projected that the bill would spend $650 million on wall construction, a far cry from the $18 billion that Trump wanted for the border wall in 2018.
Kamala Harris: “I know the importance of safety and security especially at our border.” pic.twitter.com/SJ7m2Hz4JW
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 23, 2024
The flip-flop on the border is the latest instance of Harris and her team distancing the vice president from left-wing positions she previously endorsed, such as banning fracking and supporting a Medicare-for-All health care system. The Harris campaign has made an effort to present Harris as tough-on-crime and somewhat hawkish on the border in recent weeks, with one advertisement released earlier in August depicting images of Trump’s border wall while a narrator speaks about her record as a “border-state prosecutor.”
The Harris campaign has noted that the failed border bill — which would have permitted an average of 5,000 migrants per day to cross the border — does not include any new money for building a wall and contains other provisions, such as additional money to pay for asylum attorneys and judges, according to Axios.
“Kamala’s RECORD proves she is pro-open border. She called the wall ‘un-American,’ a ‘waste of taxpayer money,’ ‘medieval,’ and said it isn’t going to ‘stop’ illegal immigration,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As a senator, Kamala tried to block President Trump’s construction of the border wall. As Border Czar, Kamala Harris halted construction of the border wall. Kamala’s ACTIONS speak much louder than the WORDS of the anonymous staff she is cowering behind.”
The Biden-Harris administration has overseen a crisis at the border that started after the administration walked back several key policies that the Trump administration instituted. Since 2021, there have been at least 6.7 million encounters with migrants at the southern border and 8 million encounters nationwide, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the House Committee on Homeland Security.
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to request for comment.
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