Kamala Harris's campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez wrote the candidate's response to the 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire in which Harris expressed support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants, metadata from the document show.
The Washington Free Beacon pulled the questionnaire from the ACLU website, and a review of the document's metadata shows the author as "Julie Rodriguez." The same data indicate the document was created on July 16, 2019. The ACLU published the questionnaire on September 1, 2019, three months before Harris ended her 2020 presidential primary campaign.
The revelation indicates that Harris's responses to the ACLU survey were crafted at the highest levels of her 2019 campaign. Rodriguez served as Harris's California state director before joining her 2020 campaign as national political director. She is now Harris's campaign manager.
Rodriguez's role in crafting answers to the ACLU survey undermines the Harris campaign's efforts to distance itself from the responses provided in 2019, which became an issue when CNN's Andrew Kaczynski resurfaced the questionnaire on Monday.
The Harris campaign has tried to dismiss the report, with a spokesman telling ABC News that "old questionnaires are a complete distraction from the task at hand right now" and arguing that the questionnaire responses are "not what she's proposing … not what she's running on."
Chávez Rodriguez has served alongside Harris for nearly a decade. After a stint in President Joe Biden's White House, she became Biden's and now Harris's campaign manager.
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The ACLU's 2019 questionnaire came as Harris worked to tout her liberal bona fides in a primary field that included Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). It asked Harris to support left-wing policies such as "reducing incarceration by 50% in the federal prison system" and "ending the use of ICE detainers."
Each question included "Yes" and "No" boxes for the respondent to check. In some cases, Harris did not check either box, opting instead to express her policy position in a written response. In the case of the transgender surgery question, however, Harris checked "Yes."
Asked whether, as president, she would "executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care," Harris responded:
It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition. That's why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates. I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.
CNN has faced criticism from the LGBT activist group GLAAD for highlighting the answer in Kaczynski's Monday report. GLAAD savaged the network for drawing attention to Harris's position.
"It is a disservice to viewers and inaccurate for CNN to insinuate there is something amiss with following the law as well as treating people with respect and dignity," the group's CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, said in a statement. "Transgender people and migrants are being baselessly scapegoated at every turn." Ellis also described gender transition surgeries as medically necessary, language echoed in Harris's questionnaire.
Some of CNN's own anchors, meanwhile, have ignored it. Jim Acosta snapped at a former Trump campaign official who referenced the report on air, asking, "Where is that coming from?" And after former president Donald Trump said during the debate that Harris "wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison," CNN host Wolf Blitzer called it one of Trump's "more outlandish claims."
CNN was not the only mainstream media outlet to raise questions about Trump’s claim. The New York Times fact-checked it, determining that it "needs context." Time magazine was forced to correct an article that said Harris did not support taxpayer-funded surgeries for detained illegal immigrants. The New Yorker didn't even bother.