After years of criticizing former president Donald Trump’s border wall, Vice President Kamala Harris is now vowing to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars toward its construction, Axios reported Tuesday.
Harris said at the Democratic National Convention last week that she would sign a bipartisan border security bill that requires $650 million be used to continue building the border wall begun by the Trump administration. Harris has long derided the project as "un-American," Trump's "medieval vanity project," and "a complete waste of taxpayer money [that] won't make us any safer."
Harris’s sudden support for the bill—likely driven by the Trump campaign’s recent attacks on her dismal record as President Joe Biden's point person on the border crisis—marks yet another policy reversal for Harris since she emerged as her party’s presumptive nominee last month. Her aides have already walked back her support for several key issues such as Medicare for All, taxing tips, and a fracking ban.
"[The bill] requires the Trump border wall," Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.), one of the bill’s cosponsors, 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 expressed surprise at Harris’s sudden embrace of the border bill, noting that she was absent during the months-long negotiations. "We never saw any vice president staff here. ... She was a Johnny-come-never," Lankford said. "I know she's talking about it now, but she wasn't talking about it at all before."
Harris came under fire over the weekend when her campaign released a video flaunting Trump’s border wall and pledging that "as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking." Under the Biden-Harris administration, the wall construction was halted, and more than 8 million migrants entered the United States illegally, with over 1.7 million "gotaways" now residing in the country without any vetting by immigration officials.