Vice President Kamala Harris was pressed about the border crisis Wednesday night with CNN’s Anderson Cooper asking if she thinks the border wall is “stupid.”
Harris was part of a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania moderated by Cooper, per Fox News.
“Let’s talk about this compromise bill that you want to pass if you are elected. You said that’s going to be a priority. It includes $650 million in funding for the border wall. That’s something Republicans wanted that was part of the compromise,” Cooper said. “Under Donald Trump, you criticized the wall more than 50 times. You called it ‘stupid, useless, and a medieval vanity project.’ Is a border wall stupid?”
Harris responded with a laugh.
“Let’s talk about Donald Trump on that border wall,” Harris said. “So remember, Donald Trump said Mexico would pay for it. Come on, they didn’t. How much of that wall did he build? I think the last number I saw was about 2%. And then when it came time for him to do a photo op, you know, where he did it? In the part of the wall that President Obama built.”
Cooper pressed Harris on the issue.
“But you agreed to a bill that would earmark $650 million to continue building that,” Cooper said.
“I pledge that I am going to bring forward that bipartisan bill to further strengthen and secure our border. Yes, I am, and I’m going to work across the aisle to pass a comprehensive bill that deals with a broken immigration system,” Harris said.
“We need a president who is grounded in common sense and practical outcomes, like, let’s just fix this thing. Let’s just fix it. Why is there any ideological perspective on this? Let’s just fix the problem,” Harris continued.
“So you don’t think it’s stupid anymore?” Cooper asked.
Harris continued to talk about Trump.
“I think what he did and how he did it was, did not make much sense because he actually didn’t do much of anything. I just talked about that wall, right? We just talked about it. He didn’t actually do much of anything,” she said.
Earlier in the town hall, Cooper asked why just weeks before the presidential debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, who was still in the race, the administration decided to curb illegal border crossings, but had not done so earlier.
“You’re exactly right, Anderson. And as of today, we have cut the flow of immigration by over half. In fact, the numbers I saw most recently, illegal immigration,” Harris said.
“If it was that easy without executive action, why not do it in 2022, 2023?” Cooper said.
“Because we were working with Congress and hoping that actually we could have a long term fix to the problem instead of a short-term fix,” Harris said.
“You couldn’t have done one and both at the same time,” Cooper said.
Cooper asked Harris if she thought it would have been better to have“done those executive orders in 2022, 2023.”
Harris said she believes the administration “did the right thing.”
“I think we did the right thing. And but the best thing that can happen for the American people, is that we have bipartisan work happening. And I pledge to you, that I will work across the aisle to fix this longstanding problem. I think the American people are demanding it, on both sides of the aisle,” she said.
