Kamala Harris Comes Out For The Border Wall

[California National Guard, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons]

It may go down as one of the most bizarre flip-flops of the 2024 campaign season.

For years, Kamala Harris has attacked Donald Trump for trying to build a border wall.

Now, as immigration threatens to sink her campaign in light of her failure as border czar under Joe Biden, the vice president now finds herself supporting the construction of a southern border wall.

This change in position is noteworthy as it mirrors Harris’s broader “political evolution” on several key issues. Harris, who has yet to do an interview as the Democratic nominee despite being the vice president and has only made statements through aides, once championed radical progressive causes like Medicare for All and a fracking ban, but as polling has shown those positions to be a liability, she has quickly renounced her own beliefs.

The Guardian writes that Republicans have accused Kamala Harris of a policy flip-flop after she embraced an immigration crackdown that would involve expanding the controversial US southern border wall, which she once called “un-American” and “a medieval vanity project”.

Harris committed to reviving a bipartisan immigration deal that collapsed in the Senate earlier year at last week’s Democratic national convention.

The agreement, a compromise worked out between Joe Biden’s administration and congressional Republicans, would have represented the toughest clampdown on illegal immigration in years. It unravelled after GOP members withdrew support under pressure from Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee for November’s election, because he did not want Democrats to win credit for a potentially vote-winning issue.

Reviving it means Harris is committing to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the border wall, one of Trump’s pet projects during his presidency, said James Lankford, a Republican US senator for Oklahoma, one of the deal’s architects.

“It requires the Trump border wall,” Lankford told Axios, who first broke the news of Harris’ latest policy change. “It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here’s where it will be built. Here’s how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction.”

Harris’s campaign argues that the Lankford bill is not solely focused on wall funding. They point out that it is a fraction of the $18 billion Trump requested in 2018, and it includes provisions for improving the immigration system, such as increasing funding for asylum lawyers and judges. Additionally, it grants the president the authority to close the border if daily migrant crossings exceed 5,000.

Despite these arguments, Harris’s support for the wall remains a striking reversal. This newfound support has surprised even some of her colleagues, with Lankford noting that Harris was notably absent during the negotiations leading up to the bill’s creation.

Harris’s shift in position underscores how Trump has reshaped the political landscape surrounding immigration over the past decade, forcing even his staunchest critics to reconsider their approaches to border security.

This is not the first time that Kamala Harris has simply copied an idea from Donald Trump in hopes of holding onto the White House. Earlier in the month the vice president came out in favor of no longer taxing tips, a move that many in the liberal press decried when the former president proposed it earlier in the year before praising it when the Democrats made the same offer.

[Read More: Trump Lands Big Endorsement]

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