Harris says she will build a border wall, but majority of respondents don’t believe her

By Bethany Blankley | Employee at The Center Square

(Worthy News) – In another policy shift, Vice President Kamala Harris says she now supports building a border wall, after she and President Joe Biden opposed it for nearly four years and she strongly opposed it when she was a U.S. senator.

According to a Rasmussen Reports poll, a majority of Americans surveyed don’t believe her, with just 32 percent saying she has been consistent in her positions on immigration.

Harris continued to claim in her remarks that she would sign a Senate border bill that failed to advance in the Democratic-controlled Senate and that allocates $650 million to border wall construction.

This comes after the Biden-Harris administration halted construction of the border wall in January 2021 and has since been pursuing a lawsuit against Texas over the wall, which it only recently lost in federal court. The administration has filed dozens of lawsuits over border policy against half of the US states, many of which were led by Texas.

While the Senate bill was being debated, Harris, Biden’s designated “border czar,” was not involved, multiple news reports said.

Harris has long openly opposed the construction of the border wall.

After joining the U.S. Senate in April 2017, she said former President Donald Trump’s border wall was a “dumb use of money.” “I will block any funding for this.”

In April 2018, Harris urged the Senate Budget Committee to reject Trump’s fiscal year 2019 funding request, which sought to build an “expensive and ineffective border wall,” hire new border patrol agents and increase U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel.

She urged the committee to “cut funding for the government’s reckless immigration enforcement operations,” including cutting funding for beds in the federal immigration detention system, which agents say is critical to holding the most violent criminals before they are deported.

Harris has called for the abolition of ICE on more than one occasion, The Center Square reported.

She also strongly urged the committee to “reject any funding for President Trump’s border wall,” saying that “a wall would do little to advance federal drug enforcement efforts.”

When she first ran for president in 2019, she described Trump’s border wall as a “medieval vanity project.” As vice president, she posted on Facebook in February 2020: “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars and will not make us safer.”

Multiple news outlets have recently criticized Harris for her policy shift. “It’s the latest example of Harris pivoting from her previous liberal positions, such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking — proposals that aides say she now opposes,” Axios reported.

A USA Today columnist said she thought Harris’ claim came from The Babylon Bee, a satirical website, “but it wasn’t satire.” Harris “decided she supports one of former President Donald Trump’s signature ideas — and one that progressives despise.”

CNN’s KFile Investigates combed through Harris’ social media posts from 2017 and found that she criticized Trump’s wall more than 50 times, describing it as “dumb” and “useless.”

In a campaign ad, Harris claimed to pursue Mexican cartels and combat border crime, but was criticized by sheriffs in California for not supporting her. An image of the border wall was prominently displayed in the ad. But it was a section that Trump had built, CNN reported, “in Sasabe, Arizona, in an area that previously had no border wall. The other walls have signs saying they were Trump-era walls, such as so-called anti-climb plates that were built during the Trump years.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has argued that if Harris or Biden were serious about border security, they would drop their fight with Texas in multiple border-related lawsuits, including three before the Fifth Circuit. The administration is still trying to kill Texas’ border security law, SB 4, and stop the construction of concertina wire and maritime barriers through Texas.

Harris would also reimburse Texas for the approximately $12 billion Texas taxpayers paid for border security through Abbott’s Operation Lone Star and would accept his invitations to come to the border and see the crisis firsthand, Abbott argued.

Within months of the Biden-Harris administration halting construction of the border wall, Abbott announced that Texas would build its own border wall in June 2021. Construction began on state-owned land in Rio Grande City in December 2021.

The Texas wall is made of steel and was built in the same way as the Trump wall. The first section was built and installed by a local Texas company, McAllen Strong Steel.

Unlike the federal government, which let millions of dollars’ worth of steel rust on the ground, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, construction in Texas was done in record time and with accountability, state officials say. Steven Alvis, chairman of the Texas Facilities Commission, said operations that would normally take two to three months took two to three days thanks to Texas’ ingenuity and hard work, The Center Square reported.

On Sunday, Abbott posted a video of ongoing construction of the Texas border wall in Maverick County, saying, “Texas is fighting on the front lines of the border crisis between Biden and Harris.”

Before Labor Day, he posted a video of the construction of the border wall in Starr County, saying, “Texas is the ONLY state in U.S. history to build its own border wall. We will protect Texans and Americans from the unprecedented increase in illegal immigration.”

Reprinted with permission from The Center Square.