Republicans have accused Kamala Harris of a policy flip-flop after she embraced an immigration crackdown that would involve expanding the controversial US southern border wall, which she once called “un-American” and “a medieval vanity project”.
Harris committed to reviving a bipartisan immigration deal that collapsed in the Senate earlier year at last week’s Democratic national convention.
The agreement, a compromise worked out between Joe Biden’s administration and congressional Republicans, would have represented the toughest clampdown on illegal immigration in years. It unravelled after GOP members withdrew support under pressure from Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee for November’s election, because he did not want Democrats to win credit for a potentially vote-winning issue.
Reviving it means Harris is committing to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the border wall, one of Trump’s pet projects during his presidency, said James Lankford, a Republican US senator for Oklahoma, one of the deal’s architects.
“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.”
Lankford’s office said the legislation budgeted for $650m on wall spending, a drastically smaller sum than the $18bn Trump requested in 2018 when he was president.
But spending on the structure at all represents a drastic departure from the staunch opposition Harris voiced when she was a US senator for California.
In 2017, soon after joining the Senate, she denounced it as “a stupid waste of money” and pledged to block funding.
She dismissed it as a “medieval vanity project” when announcing her first run for the presidency in 2019. In February 2020, she wrote on Facebook that “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer”.
But she has projected a different attitude in recent television campaign ads, which have shown images of the wall while Harris is depicted as a “border-state prosecutor”.
Harris’s apparent volte-face is the latest in a series of apparent policy U-turns away from liberal positions assumed in her failed bid to capture the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential primaries.
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She has recently been accused of flip-flopping after abandoning her previous commitments to Medicare for all and a ban on fracking as she assumes a more centrist stance after her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket in place of Biden, who halted his re-election campaign in July and endorsed Harris to succeed him.
Harris’s new hardline immigration posture follows attacks from the Trump campaign, which has cast her as the Biden administration’s “border czar” and blamed her for a wave of illegal border crossings.
Meanwhile, in recent days, Harris’s campaign has sought to wrong-foot Trump by turning his penchant for taunts and mockery back on him.
In the latest manifestation, the campaign ridiculed the former president for threatening to pull out of a scheduled debate on ABC on 10 September by posting interviews of his objections against the background noise of clucking chickens.
The Trump campaign has parried by highlighting Harris’s failure to give a major media interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, contrasting it with a rash of recent interviews given by the former president.
