Harris Flip-Flops on Building the Border Wall

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.

Why it matters: It’s the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past liberal positions such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking — proposals that aides say she now is against.

• Harris is embracing a more hawkish immigration policy as Donald Trump’s campaign spends tens of millions of dollars attacking her about the border.
• But she still has significant differences with Trump on immigration, opposing his approach to family separation and his plans for mass deportations.

Driving the news: In her speech to the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris said she would sign the recent bipartisan border security bill — which Trump had ordered his allies to kill, fearing it would help Democrats in the November elections.

• 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.

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Lankford’s office estimated the legislation would spend $650 million on a wall, down from the $18 billion Trump requested in 2018.

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Flashback: 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.

• In February 2020, Harris wrote on Facebook that “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”
• In April 2017, soon after joining the Senate, Harris said the wall was a “stupid use of money. I will block any funding for it.”

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Zoom in: Beyond embracing the bipartisan bill, Harris’ campaign has portrayed her as an immigration hardliner in ads.

• One Harris TV ad frames her time as California’s attorney general as that of a “border state prosecutor,” and includes images of the border wall.

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• Most of Trump campaign ads have attacked Harris for the Biden administration’s struggle to deal with waves of migrants crossing the border.

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