Editors at National Review Online question Kamala Harris’ latest comments about the southern border.
Kamala Harris is now, and for the next 50-something days, officially a border hawk.
It’s not hard to understand why. A recent Pew survey showed that six in ten voters say that immigration is very important to their vote. Over eight in ten Republicans say as much, and 39 percent of Harris voters say the same. President Biden’s approval ratings have been in the tank on this issue since he opened the floodgates, and Harris had an important role in addressing the supposed root causes of the problem in Latin America.
With all this in mind, Harris sought to minimize her vulnerability on the issue at the Tuesday debate, very unpersuasively. Harris claimed to be “the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings,” which is true only insofar as she was the only prosecutor on the stage. In fact, as a prosecutor, Harris was soft on criminal illegal immigrants. She supported San Francisco’s sanctuary-city policy. That policy meant that Edwin Ramos was not referred to federal authorities after being arrested several times as a juvenile for violent assaults. He would go on to commit a triple homicide. Her “Back on Track” program allowed nonviolent offenders to have their records expunged if they received job training. The loophole allowed illegal immigrants to access that job training. One beneficiary of the program, Alexander Izaguirre, robbed a woman and mowed her down with an SUV, fracturing his victim’s skull. …
… At least the Lankford bill was faux-toughness. The same wasn’t true of a bill introduced by Senator Kamala Harris in 2019 that would have taken $220 million from the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE and given it to NGOs that would provide illegal aliens with a social worker — usually, an immigrant-rights activist. The bill would have forbidden ICE from arresting or deporting any criminal alien who was seeking to sponsor an “unaccompanied alien minor.” That is, every violent criminal would have received a get-out-of-deportation card by simply naming a foreign minor.
