The Trump campaign is pushing back against media claims that Vice President Kamala Harris has changed her position on a border wall.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday in a statement that the Harris campaign is attempting to obscure the vice president’s record on immigration, calling Harris “pro-open border.”
“How much longer will the mainstream media allow Kamala Harris to hide and use staff to speak on her behalf? 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,” Leavitt said.
“Kamala’s RECORD proves she is pro-open border. She called the wall ‘un-American,’ a ‘waste of taxpayer money,’ ‘medieval,’ and said it isn’t going to ‘stop’ illegal immigration. As a senator, Kamala tried to block President Trump’s construction of the border wall. As Border Czar, Kamala Harris halted construction of the border wall,” Leavitt said. “Kamala’s ACTIONS speak much louder than the WORDS of the anonymous staff she is cowering behind.”
Her statement came after Axios published a story headlined, “Harris flip-flops on building the border wall.” The story characterizes Harris’ support for a bipartisan border bill as a flip in favor of supporting a wall along the southern border. The bill, which died in Congress earlier this year, was negotiated by a team of lawmakers including Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
“It requires the Trump border wall,” Lankford told Axios. “It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here’s where it will be built. Here’s how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction.”
The proposed legislation would cut down border wall spending to a fraction of what Trump requested during his term and would allocate $650 million toward the border wall, far below Trump’s request of $18 billion.
In addition to restricting the funds needed to complete the border wall, the legislation would codify a number of rules that border experts have said would lead to the crisis at the border growing worse. The bill would only force the Department of Homeland Security to take emergency action on the border if encounters rise to an average of 5,000 a day for seven consecutive days or 8,500 encounters in one day.
The bill would also codify and continue the “catch and release” of illegal immigrants. “If passed into law, families and children would be released without supervision,” according to The Heritage Foundation. It would also allow the Department of Homeland Security to expand parole authority to provide legal pathways for immigrants to take advantage of to enter the U.S. — a tool that the Biden-Harris administration has already taken advantage of to increase immigration.
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