DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The border crisis could reach new heights or largely remain unchanged if Vice President Kamala Harris ends up winning the presidential election on Nov. 5, border hawks warn.
President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race Sunday and immediately endorsed Harris, making her the leading contender to snag the party’s delegates and the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
Harris’ past voting record in the Senate, comments she’s made about federal immigration authorities, and recent actions taken in the White House all signal a sharp pivot left if she were to win the election by defeating former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
“I would say more of the same or potentially even worse,” Eric Ruark, research director for NumbersUSA, a group that works toward limiting illegal immigration, said in a conversation with the Daily Caller News Foundation about possible border policy changes if Harris were to replace Biden. “Biden had a history of being at least rhetorically against illegal immigration.”
“Harris has yet to come out and say, ‘It’s a crime and we need to enforce the law,’” Ruark said. “Clearly, she was tasked with addressing the border crisis by President Biden, and her approach was basically to say, ‘Don’t come.’ That was the extent of her policy approach.”
NumbersUSA publishes “report cards” on every lawmaker in Congress, evaluating how each performs on immigration and other border security issues. During her short time in the Senate representing California before leaving for the White House, Harris earned a grade of F-, the lowest possible score.
The then-senator earned failing grades for votes on immigration-related issues such as border security, interior enforcement, refugee management, and amnesty, according to NumbersUSA.
NumbersUSA highlighted Harris’ 2019 co-sponsorship of the RAIDER Act, which would have blocked Trump’s construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and her 2019 co-sponsorship of the FACE Act, which would have made it more difficult for Trump to continue to build the wall. The organization also graded her vote against the Secure and Protect Act which, it argues, would have positively reformed the so-called Flores Settlement Agreement.
Other border hawks expressed trepidation over Harris’ enforcement record related to illegal immigration through U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Kamala Harris wasn’t just Biden’s Border Czar, she was his Abolish ICE Director—directing the agency in charge of enforcing our immigration laws to willfully violate them,” RJ Hauman, president of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement, said. “Now that Biden is out of the picture, she is sure to return to some of the most insane anti-enforcement positions that we’ve ever seen from an elected official.”
As illegal border crossings quickly climbed early in the Biden administration’s tenure, the president tapped Kamala to lead an effort to address the root causes of unlawful migration from Central America, a position many described as “border czar.” However, Border Patrol encounters with illegal aliens at the southern border went on to reach recording-setting levels, according to the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
[Both ICE and CBP are part of the Department of Homeland Security.]
Enforcement experts have noted that the root causes of illegal immigration remain unaddressed and lawmakers in Congress have sought to hold Harris specifically responsible for the ongoing border crisis. Harris also was heavily criticized for taking so long to visit the southern border.
“The choice in November will now be even more clear—mass deportation or mass release of illegal aliens and violent criminals into American communities,” Hauman said.
Harris compared ICE, a government agency, to the Ku Klux Klan during a November 2018 Senate confirmation hearing. She asked Ron Vitiello, then Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, if he knew there was a “perception” among Latino immigrants that ICE agents operate like Klan members.
As a California senator, Harris also suggested during a June 2018 media interview that ICE essentially should be abolished and rebuilt again “from scratch.”
Upon election to the White House, the Biden-Harris administration oversaw a monumental overhaul of Trump policies that beefed up border and interior enforcement. Biden took 89 executive actions that specifically reversed or began the process of reversing Trump’s immigration policies, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute.
The White House immediately halted construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and shuttered Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, which had largely eliminated asylum fraud by keeping asylum-seekers in Mexico while their cases were adjudicated. The administration also attempted to enforce a 100-day moratorium on all deportations.
To be successful in his reelection bid, Ruark said, the Republican nominee would need to do more than offer criticisms of Harris and instead put forward a policy platform on how his new administration would hit the ground running on Day One to “undo the damage” the Biden administration did to border security.
In his Republican National Convention speech last week, Trump promised the “largest deportation operation” in the country’s history, completed construction of the border wall, and other hardline approaches to border security.
One local leader near the southern border noted the incredible burden that Biden’s border crisis has placed on the district he represents.
“Under Biden with the open border, we had over 150,000 people dropped in the streets here in San Diego County from a period of about eight or nine months,” San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a Republican, said Monday.
“It put pressure on our law enforcement, put pressure on our hospitals and shelters, and we bore all the burden of these people just freely and willingly able to cross the border,” Desmond said, noting that Biden had assigned Harris to address the crisis. “She has failed us on the border.”
Desmond noted that the border crisis isn’t a “red or blue” issue, but something that’s been affecting everyone in his district, particularly those with homes near the border who’ve had to deal with a constant flow of asylum-seekers passing through their property.
Since Biden withdrew from the race Sunday and endorsed Harris, a growing number of Democrat leaders have gotten in line behind the vice president’s fledgling candidacy, establishing her as the presumptive nominee before the DNC convenes Aug. 19 in Chicago.
“What we’ve seen from her career in the Senate and the public statements she’s made, it would only get worse,” Ruark said of the border situation. “As bad as things are, they can get worse, and that’s something we should all realize.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation