Last week, Kamala Harris declared that if elected president, she would sign a bipartisan bill that allowed Trump's border wall to resume construction while increasing funding for asylum lawyers.
Axios reports:
If she's elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border — a project she once opposed and called “un-American” during the Trump administration.
That bill, negotiated by senators such as James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), requires hundreds of millions of dollars of unspent funds to be used to continue building a wall on the border.
The bill, which Murphy described as a “compromise” also included provisions with more money for asylum lawyers and judges for the overloaded immigration system. It also gave the president the authority to shut down the border if more than an average of 5,000 migrants crossed per day.
In declaring her candidacy in her first run for president in 2019, Harris called the wall Trump's “medieval vanity project” that wasn't going to stop transnational gangs from entering the U.S.
The Biden-Harris administration halted construction of the border wall, despite the funds being allocated in 2019. He attempted to redirect funding despite federal law clarifying that when Congress specifies funds for a specific purpose, those funds can only be spent on what has been previously agreed to. The state of Texas sued them over this, and a judge ordered the Biden-Harris administration to continue building the wall earlier this year.
Harris is reportedly desperate to distance herself from her progressive past ahead of the election, and in addition to flip flopping on the border wall, she's changed her positions on fracking, environmental policy, and multiple aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Kamala Harris supporters and skeptics may find themselves confused about what exactly what her intentions are on immigration, as pro-immigration groups have expressed their approval of the media's coverage of her “evolving” views. They seem to believe that she's using a centrist approach ahead of the election, but will embrace radical policies in office, including sweeping amnesty and voting rights within the first hundred days in office.
One staff member for a pro-migration organization said, “we know, based on where she's been in the past, that her policies are probably going to be aligned with [our] policies.”
Another progressive organizer (who requested to speak anonymously in order to speak candidly) said, “We have to win. We're not in an advocacy moment now; we're in a win-the-damn-election moment. We'll shift into advocacy on Nov. 6.”
