Vice President Kamala Harris has changed her position on several immigration and border security policies, including decriminalizing illegal border crossings and closing immigrant detention centers, the Harris campaign confirmed to Fox News on Thursday.
“While Donald Trump holds fast to the extreme ideas of his Project 2025 plan, Vice President Harris believes that true leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus,” spokesperson Mia Ellenberg said in a statement. “This approach has enabled the Biden-Harris Administration to make bipartisan breakthroughs on everything from infrastructure to gun violence prevention. As president, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on commonsense solutions for progress.”
Harris has faced heavy questioning over her past positions on border security as a California senator and as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. A campaign adviser to Harris told Fox that her positions were “shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris Administration.”
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Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, step off the campaign bus in Savannah, Georgia, on August 28, 2024, for a two-day campaign bus tour across Georgia. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Harris previously voiced support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings during the 2020 presidential primary, arguing that crossing illegally should be made a civil crime.
“Illegal immigrants are not criminals,” she said in 2017.
“The Vice President's position is consistent with the Administration's: Unauthorized border crossings are illegal,” a campaign spokesman told Fox this week.
Regarding detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), she promised as a presidential candidate in 2019 to close immigrant detention centers “on day one.”
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Her campaign said Thursday that her position is consistent with that of the administration, which “will continue to ensure sufficient resources to enforce the law, prioritize the detention and deportation of individuals who pose a threat to public safety and national security, and ensure compliance with immigration proceedings and decisions, including deportations.”
More broadly, Harris has repeatedly supported a bipartisan Senate bill that emerged from congressional negotiations earlier this year that includes increased funding for the border, including bed space for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and mechanisms to limit the number of asylum seekers entering the US.
Migrants walk along a highway through Suchiate, Chiapas, southern Mexico, on their way north to the U.S. border, Sunday, July 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Edgar H. Clemente)
President Biden signed an executive order in June restricting asylum at the border, which led to a sharp drop in the number of refugees crossing the border after a historic three-year crisis. The administration has said the low numbers are a direct result of the executive order, and has renewed its push for the bill to pass the Senate, blaming former President Trump for its failure to pass.
“The only 'plan' Donald Trump has for securing the border is separating mothers from their children and carrying xenophobic signs at the Republican National Convention. He destroyed a bipartisan border security deal because to Donald Trump this wasn't about solving a problem, it was about adding to the problem,” spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement.
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“Like everything Donald Trump does, it is never about helping the country, it is only about helping himself. There is only one candidate in this race who will fight for a bipartisan solution to strengthen border security, and that is Vice President Harris,” he said.
The Trump campaign attacked Harris' positions this week, refuting media reports that suggested she had become more moderate on the issues. In response to the Fox report, the Trump campaign said Harris has “spouted dangerously liberal positions on all of these issues for a decade.”
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“She hasn't changed, she's just lying,” the campaign argued.
