The Trump campaign on Tuesday pushed back against a narrative within the media that Vice President Kamala Harris is taking a more positive approach to border wall construction — calling such a claim “preposterous.”
“How much longer will the mainstream media allow Kamala Harris to hide and use staff to speak on her behalf?” Karoline Leavitt, National Press Secretary for the Trump campaign said in a statement. “It’s DAY 37 of ZERO interviews and Kamala’s anonymous campaign sources are now claiming she supports President Trump’s border wall — this is a preposterous and false claim.”
Axios ran a headline on Tuesday morning that accused Harris of a “flip flop” on border wall construction. It noted Harris’ support of a bipartisan border security bill introduced in January. The bill pushes funding to the border, while also authorizing limits on asylum entries.
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The Harris campaign has not announced that an interview has been scheduled. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
The package, which has the support of the Biden administration but has so far failed to drum up enough Republican support to pass the chamber, also includes a limited amount of funding for additional border wall construction, but it is just a fraction of the $25 billion former President Trump eyed for the project.
While Harris, along with President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have consistently backed the bill, Axios said that her recent speech at the Democratic National Convention in which she said she would sign the bill was a sign of her embracing a more hawkish immigration policy.
“Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades. The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal. Well, I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my pledge to you. As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law. I know — I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” she said.
New ads, in which the Harris campaign portrays the former California senator as tough on the border, show images of the Trump-era border wall.
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Candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks at the U.S.-Mexico border on August 22, 2024 south of Sierra Vista, Arizona. Trump will hold a rally in Glendale, Arizona tomorrow. (Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images) (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
But the Trump campaign noted that, despite that limited support, Harris has a history of opposing the wall at the border. The Trump administration built more than 400 miles of border wall, and it was abruptly halted by the Biden-Harris administration in 2021.
While there have been some gaps filled and some limited extra construction due to already appropriated congressional funds, the administration has consistently said it opposes border wall construction and there have been no indications of plans for significant extra construction.
Additionally, Harris has long been a critic of the wall construction that took place in the Trump-era. In 2018, Harris called the wall “un-American.” That came a year after she joined Democrats in introducing a bill to block border wall construction.
During her campaign launch in 2019, she dismissed the wall’s effectiveness.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF THE BORDER SECURITY CRISIS
“On the subject of transnational gangs, let’s be perfectly clear. The president’s medieval vanity project is not going to stop them,” she said.
In 2020, she called it “a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”
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The Trump campaign also sought to link her to the decision to halt border wall construction in her role “as border czar” — although that role was limited to international diplomacy related to root causes.
“As Border Czar, Kamala Harris halted construction of the border wall. Kamala’s ACTIONS speak much louder than the WORDS of the anonymous staff she is cowering behind,” Leavitt said.
Trump senior adviser Jason Miller described the report as “total bulls—” and said that Harris “hasn’t flip-flopped on anything.”
“Harris opposes the wall, has always opposed the wall, and stopped wall construction as VP,” he said.
