The Trump campaign on Tuesday denied media reports that Vice President Kamala Harris is open to building a border wall, calling such claims “absurd.”
“How long will the mainstream media allow Kamala Harris to hide and use staff to speak on her behalf?” Caroline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement. “After 37 days of zero interviews, an anonymous Kamala campaign associate is now claiming that Harris supports President Trump's border wall. This is a wildly false claim.”
Axios ran a story with a headline on Tuesday morning accusing Harris of “flipping the page” on the border wall, noting that she supports a bipartisan border security bill introduced in January that would pump money into the border but also allow for restrictions on refugee admissions.
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The Harris campaign has not announced when the interview will be scheduled. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Martin, File)
The bill has the backing of the Biden administration but has so far failed to garner enough Republican support to pass the House of Representatives. It also includes limited funding for additional border wall construction, but only a fraction of the $25 billion former President Trump had hoped for the project.
Harris has consistently supported the bill along with President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Axios says Her recent speech at the Democratic National Convention in which she said she would sign the bill signals her support for tougher immigration policies.
“Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades, and the Border Patrol approved it. But Donald Trump thought the border deal would hurt his campaign and ordered his allies in Congress to scrap it. I refuse to play politics over security, and I pledge to you that as President, I will resurrect the bipartisan border security bill that Trump killed and sign it into law. I know we can reform our broken immigration system, create a path to citizenship, and secure our border, all while living up to our proud tradition as a nation of immigrants,” she said.
The Harris campaign is using imagery from the Trump-era border wall in a new ad that portrays the former California senator as a hard-liner on the border.
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Former presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the U.S.-Mexico border south of Sierra Vista, Arizona, on August 22, 2024. Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Glendale, Arizona tomorrow. (Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images) (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
But the Trump campaign pointed out that despite her limited support, Harris has a history of opposing the border wall, with the Trump administration building more than 400 miles of border wall that was abruptly halted in 2021 by the Biden-Harris administration.
While congressional funds already allocated have filled some gaps and allowed for limited additional construction, the administration has consistently said it opposes border wall construction and there are no signs of any plans for significant additional construction.
Additionally, Harris has long been critical of the wall construction carried out during the Trump administration, calling it “un-American” in 2018, a year after she joined the Democratic Party and introduced legislation to block the border wall.
At the start of her 2019 campaign, she dismissed the wall's effectiveness.
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“When it comes to international gangsters, let's be clear: some presidential medieval vanity project won't stop them.” She said.
In 2020 she called it “a complete waste of taxpayer money and will not make us safer.”
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The Trump campaign also tried to claim that she was involved in the decision to halt construction of the border wall as “secretary for border affairs,” but her role was limited to international diplomacy on the underlying causes.
“As border secretary, Kamala Harris stopped construction of the border wall. Her actions speak far more than the words of her anonymous, frightened staff,” Leavitt said.
Jason Miller, senior adviser to President Trump Report Calling him a “total liar,” Harris said she “has never backed down on anything.”
“Harris is against the wall, she has always been against it, and as vice president she blocked the wall from being built,” he said.
