Axois is claiming that Vice President Kamala Harris supports former President Donald Trump’s border wall because she backs the Senate’s border bill that requires agency officials to spend border wall funds appropriated under Trump.
An Axios headline makes the claim, “Harris flip-flops on building the border wall” even though the article includes no quotes or statements from Harris or her campaign.
Her campaign pushed back, telling Axios:
Harris advisers note that the bipartisan border proposal didn’t include any new money to continue building the wall.
It just extended the timeline to spend funds that had been appropriated during Trump’s last year as president, they say, although the legislation has new restrictions to ensure the money is spent on barriers.
“It’s laughably implausible,” responded Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“She hasn’t said a word about this, but her campaign is trying to do the same thing Trump did in 2016 — using the wall as a shorthand for toughness on immigration,” Krikorian said. “The way to persuade anybody that she’s not just lying but to actually use her current position to show progress on some of these issues.”
“What she has to have to do is go to the wall and give a speech saying, ‘The administration I have been a part of for four years mistakenly opposed the wall, and I’m calling on President Biden to restart construction on the wall, and I will carry that forward if I’m elected,'” Krikorian told Breitbart News.
“Corporate press needs to make clear no revisions of Harris’ lifelong public commitments to radical [migration] policies will be accepted in the form of [an] anonymous quote,” said a tweet from Trump’s border adviser, Stephen Miller. “Either Harris does an interview or it doesn’t exist.”
The bill extended expiring appropriations for $650 million in border wall funding. Much of that money would be likely used by Biden’s border chief to fund his plan to close a few gaps in the wall and perhaps to install some of the wall’s lighting and sensors that Biden’s deputies called for. The pans are not intended to block migrants but to steer them toward safer crossing points.
Harris has been a determined opponent of Trump’s border wall since at least 2015:
https://t.co/UOFTg430kv pic.twitter.com/hettUNU1uH
— NumbersUSA (@NumbersUSA) August 27, 2024
Harris’s current platform touts the February border deal, which uses a theatrical display of border enforcement to obscure many hard-to-recognize legal changes that ensure a vast inflow of extra workers, consumers, and renters. The legalized inflow will transfer even more wealth from ordinary American families to older investors on Wall Street.
Voters — including white-collar, Latino, and black — are increasingly opposed to the pocketbook and civic damage that illegal and legal migration cause. For example, support for the border wall has climbed to roughly 55 percent.
However, the Democrat Party leadership and base are increasingly committed to nation-changing migration. “No nation, no society has ever tried to build a democracy as big and as diverse as ours before, one that includes people that, over decades, have come from every corner of the globe … The rest of the world is watching to see if we can actually pull this off,” former President Barack Obama told the Democratic National Convention.
Many consumer-economy investors and donors who profit from the inflow of consumers, renters, and workers share the high-migration goal.
Harris’s record is so pro-migration that her allies in the pro-migration groups are silent about her apparent promise of tough enforcement. “We know, based on where she’s been in the past, that her policies are probably going to be aligned with UnidosUS’ policies,” Carmen Feliciano, the advocacy chief for UnidosUS, a pro-migration group formerly named LaRaza, told Politico.
The Harris campaign is trying to zig-zag through the political dilemma.
The campaign “wants to reduce illegal border crossings but not migration overall,” said Krikorian. “She’s not going to make that point, and her lickspittles in the media aren’t going to make that point, either. But this is a part of the broader political two-step where you say you’re against illegal immigration, but you’re for legal immigration.”
“A wall is irrelevant if you’re letting in everybody who wants to come in via ‘legal’ pathways — it isn’t that much different from the tollbooth in Blazing Saddles,” Krikorian said.
Another walk-back by an anonymous aide.
Here’s Kamala calling the border wall a "vanity project" because "by definition," illegal immigration is "not an emergency."pic.twitter.com/9XK4xaKcNr https://t.co/lSDypNaSrp
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 27, 2024
The two-step maneuver has been implemented by border czar Alejandro Mayorkas, who describes his many “legal pathways” as the solution to border chaos. Since 2021, Mayorkas has imported at least one million economic migrants via legally contested parole, amnesty, family unification, and visa-worker programs.
The media have not spotlighted the Mayorkas and Harris two-step, said Krikorian, partly because Trump is also saying that the government should help businesses with imported workers, consumers, and renters. “Her campaign is taking advantage of the fact that Trump is also a legal good/illegal bad politician, and her campaign is going with that flow,” said Krikorian.
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