The Daily - Kamala Harris’s Record on Immigration

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

As Vice President Kamala Harris moves into the final stretch of her campaign, one of the biggest issues both for voters and for Republicans attacking her is the surge of migrants crossing the southern border over the past four years.Zolan Kanno-Youngs, who covers the White House for The Times, discusses Ms. Harris’s record on border policy.Guest: Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: As Republicans attack Ms. Harris on immigration, here’s what her record shows.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. As Vice President Kamala Harris moves into the final stretch of her campaign, one of the biggest issues for voters and for Republicans attacking her is the surge of migrants across the southern border over the past four years and her role in it. Today, I talked to my colleague Zolan Kano-Youngs about her record. It's Thursday, September 5th. So Zolan, we're gearing up for the presidential debate next week. And one of the biggest issues for voters is immigration. This is something that you and I have talked about a lot on the show, and we've talked

about how there has been this real spike in border crossings over the past few years, record numbers, and Republicans are trying to pin those on Harris. So because we know Republicans and Trump are going to keep attacking her on this issue. We wanted to come to you, our expert, and ask you what exactly her record has been on immigration and what we know about how she might approach that issue if she is elected. Right. So we do know that Republicans at this point are aggressively trying to attach Vice President Kamala Harris to the border crisis that existed for much of the Biden administration. And we also know that a lot of voters, including supporters of the Democratic Party, are trying

to figure out and learn more about the Vice President on a variety of issues. This is one of them. And while her role in the federal government was limited when it came to this issue, just by looking at the vice president's career, dating back to early 2000s, when she was a prosecutor in California, we can start to get signs and indications of this leader's approach overall to the border and immigration. Okay, so let's dig into that. Let's go back to those early days of hers in California. What was her job? So Harris was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003.

This was the start of her career as an elected official. And even then, a part of her work was dedicated to immigration. I think most would describe San Francisco as a liberal city. And when it came to immigration, it was also known as a sanctuary city. So that basically means that it was a city that didn't want its local law enforcement to pursue immigration enforcement, right? This leads to an interesting situation with Harris because at the time, she actually locked heads with the board of supervisors over how to carry out that sanctuary city policy. Harris, as well as the then mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom at the time, supported turning over juvenile undocumented immigrants if they were charged with committing

a crime. They would be turned over to immigration enforcement. Interesting. So essentially insisting that they be turned over to federal agents who would presumably deport them, which is a pretty hard line for a Democrat. Yeah. At the time in 2009, the New York Times reported that it resulted in roughly a hundred undocumented immigrants, younger undocumented

immigrants getting turned over to federal law enforcement. And you're exactly right for potential or even likely deportation. Now, this got a lot of backlash from immigration advocates, also from the local board of supervisors at the time, because those undocumented immigrants didn't need to have a conviction in order to be turned over ties. So there were accusations that actually those undocumented immigrants were not being given their full due process under law. But at the time Harris said that this was necessary to maintain cooperation with federal law enforcement and that a sanctuary city status didn't exactly mean that you would issue sort of blanket protection for undocumented immigrants that had committed crimes. That being said, her position and her

approach was nuanced. She also worked within the law to also assist undocumented immigrants. So how'd she do that? Tell me about that. Well, I mean one way is she went after employers who she accused of abusing undocumented immigrants by not paying them adequate wages. She also supported issuing these sort of specialized visas for undocumented victims of violent crimes and she denounced proposed federal legislation that would have criminalized assisting undocumented immigrants.

So you are seeing somebody willing to pursue enforcement, but you're also seeing somebody that's willing to work within the law to provide some humanitarian relief to undocumented immigrants as well. So in other words, there are lots of sticks here. She's part of law enforcement, but when it comes to her approach to immigrants, there are carrots as well. I think that's right. And that's the approach that she would try to own when she became the top law enforcement officer in the state, the attorney general of California, a border state, a state with some of the most undocumented immigrants in the country,

no longer just DEA of sort of liberal San Francisco, but now a large part of her responsibility was also how to approach immigration. So, starting from about 2011 when she's starting her career as attorney general, you saw Harris really start to focus on the border and some of the criminal gangs and cartel organizations that she would say were facilitating the illegal crossings at the border and exploiting migrants at the time, analyzing different data trends and crimes committed by some of these transnational gangs and cartels. At one point, she led a

delegation of other attorneys general to Mexico to learn more about cartels. So already you see somebody leaning into a law enforcement approach to tackle this issue. Okay, so that's her California era. Then of course she's elected to the US Senate, which happens in 2016, which is the same year that former President Trump wins the presidency. He of course kind of redefines the issue of immigration which is the same year that former President Trump wins the presidency.

He of course kind of redefines the issue of immigration by coming up with policies that are pretty far to the right. How does she respond to that in her seat as Senator? Sure. Let's just describe this moment that Harris is coming to Washington. And the Trump administration, in those early early days they were issuing a flurry of executive actions to change the way our immigration system worked. One of the more known examples were these travel bans that he issued including travel bans against Muslim majority countries,

right? And I talked to some of the people who worked with Harris when she was a senator at the time and they were saying, look, it was almost as soon as she got in, there was a need to now respond to some of these policies, utilize her connections in the legal world to pro-immigration advocates that she made connections with back in California to work with them on opposing some of these policies. And then also, publicly, she became someone that was sort of known, particularly in congressional testimonies of Trump administration officials, as somebody who would almost cross examine some of his top immigration advisors.

So this was of course a period when the language we heard from Democrats became pretty limited to combating Trump and all of his border policies, which, of course, brings us to the primary campaign in 2019 and Harris' run for president. Yeah, I mean, look, Democrats during the Trump era were on the defensive. And in that time period, so many Democrats, including Harris, spent so much time investigating, criticizing, calling to question

the Trump administration's approach to immigration. That sort of grew to define the overall rhetoric from Democrats on immigration, essentially not being Trump. And that carried over as well to the presidential elections when it came to the different campaign platforms for each candidate. Democrats at that time in 2019 and going into the 2020 election,

most of the time they spent their time basically saying how they would roll back Trump era policies or not do what he did. But there was a question about what they would do. And in some cases, they moved even further to the left than we've seen Democrats historically go on the border and immigration. I will also immediately put in place even further to the left than we've seen Democrats historically go on the border and immigration.

I will also immediately put in place a meaningful process for reviewing the cases for asylum. I will release children from cages. I will get rid of the private detention centers. You see Harris criticizing a sweeping border policy known as Title 42 that essentially turned migrants away without giving most of them the opportunity to ask for protection in the U.S. You see her even at one point express support for decriminalizing border crossings. Let me just be very clear. We have to have a secure border, but I am in favor of saying that we're not going to treat people who are undocumented across the border as criminals. That's correct. You see her saying that ICE might need to be overhauled as well.

Listen, I think there's no question that we've got to critically re-examine ICE and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing. And we need to probably think about starting from scratch. Right. She took on these very pro-immigration stances as a primary candidate. Right. But as we know, Harris's presidential campaign didn't last too long. She dropped out pretty early on and she would later be picked as Biden's running mate. And after coming into office, President Biden took a more hardline approach at the border than

Democrats in modern history have taken. And his vice president went right along with him. We'll be right back. Okay, so Harris becomes vice president and kind of takes up the party line of the Biden administration on immigration. We know she had some role related to immigration in her job as vice president. What did she actually do? Yeah, so the vice president had a pretty specific role when it comes to this issue. For one, I think it's worth saying that it wasn't like the vice president is the one

who is deciding or shaping even the specific way to handle asylum seekers at the US Mexico border. She's not dictating border policy like at the actual US Mexico border. She's not dictating border policy like at the actual US Mexico border. That's the Homeland Security Secretary. That's not gonna be the vice president's role. What her role was was essentially addressing the poverty and the corruption in what's known as the Northern Triangle of Central America. We're talking about Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and these countries for years,

had made up many, at times the majority of migrants who were crossing the border into the United States. So her team describes this as addressing the root causes of migration, the sort of societal systemic factors of poverty and violence that were pushing people to get up and take that dangerous journey to the United States. Okay, so she's tasked with this root causes mission. How does she tackle that?

So there's kind of a two part strategy to this role. You know, one is that she's tasked with bolstering democratic institutions in this region. So what does that mean? That's pressing leaders to ensure a free and fair election, right? Making sure that those who are fairly elected actually make it to office, which was the case in Guatemala. And then the second is she's effectively a chief fundraiser. A huge part of her role was essentially getting together all of these business leaders that in the past might have been hesitant to invest in this region and using the office of the vice presidency to encourage them to invest in this region with the ultimate goal of creating

jobs and training programs that could help some of the families that at that time were considering could help some of the families that at that time were considering traveling north to the United States. So, okay, did it actually work to bring down immigration levels? Yeah, the short answer is we really won't know for years. When I've talked to business leaders that worked on this initiative, they told me and we're clear eyed that this was going to take as long as maybe a decade, definitely not within one presidential term to see its full results. And that speaks to just how daunting of a task this

is. I mean, I went on that first trip in 2021 with Harris to Guatemala. And actually, before she arrived, I got there before her and went to this rural village in Huey Huey, Tinnango in northern Guatemala, where there were plenty of families that had relatives that had made that trek to the United States. And I asked them, was this initiative, the vice president's involvement, encourage you to stay home?

And they explained that their families for generations had traveled to the US and found a way to support their families. That's sort of the generational cycle that you're going up against here if you're Kamala Harris. So it was quite a daunting task. Right. But it also was at a time of sort of a global migration trend, a shift in global migration, where we had more migrants coming from different parts of South America as far as Africa and China. Meanwhile, this strategy remained focused on the Northern Triangle.

So there was also some criticism that it was slow to adapt in a way. So basically, Harris did a fine job of the task she was asked to do, but it's just that that task was never going to be all that meaningful to the overall problem of too many migrants trying to cross into the United States. Yeah, on its own, Harris's task was not going to be the sort of primary policy response to the soaring number,

the record number of illegal crossings that we saw in the short term. But that being said, Harris was still a part of this administration. She was still the number two, Biden's number two, when there were unaccompanied children and teenagers crossing in mass, encountering squalid border detention facilities in 2021, and rising all the way towards this past year where in December of 2023, remember, we were getting 10,000 crossings a day at one point. The border and the administration's handling of immigration became a top concern for voters.

And you saw the Biden White House also respond to that pendulum shift. Even working with a group of conservative Republicans in the Senate to draft a Senate bill that would severely restrict asylum at the Southwest border. And we know, of course, the fate of that legislation. It dies.

It's torpedoed by former President Trump. Yep. Former President Trump did not want the White House to get this election year victory, which is how many saw it. So Trump torpedoes it. And then we see the White House take action on their own and issue this executive order that is still in place today that did many of the things that that Senate bill would do, namely restricting asylum, restricting the ability for migrants to claim asylum, to get protection, to stay in the United

States. And look, you know, since that executive order was signed, we've seen border crossings plummet. I mean, that could be for a variety of reasons, but without a doubt, since President Biden, since the Biden White House issued this executive order, you've seen border crossings plummet. Okay, so Harris inherits all of this once she becomes the nominee. But since that time, she probably hasn't laid out a policy plan on the issue or given us a lot of detail about how she's thinking about it. Are we to assume that her campaign approach

is just basically what he said? You know, like agreeing wholesale with Biden's policy? Yeah, you're totally right. We have not seen Harris at this point issue sort of a comprehensive policy platform on immigration. But make no mistake, the few times this has come up, the emphasis has been on border security. It has been on sort of describing herself as the one person in the election that actually has investigated transnational criminal organizations, cartel organizations.

It's been talking about her time as a prosecutor. On the border, the choice is simple. Kamala Harris supports increasing the number of border patrol agents. Democrats even issued an advertisement for Harris. Donald Trump blocked a bill to increase the number of border patrol agents. In which they talked about that Senate bill that Trump torpedoed. So you know, you're not seeing her talk about it all the time, but the few times that she

does talk about it, there's a similar sort of emphasis on what we were hearing from President Biden. So Zolan, stepping back from everything you've told me, Harris doesn't really have the kind of record on this issue that would show us any kind of strong stance on immigration and border policy. She just doesn't have it. Just like a lot of things, she's kind of hard to pin down. And at the end of the day, her campaign policy is basically Biden's policy. That's what you're saying.

And that's the policy Republicans, of course, are attacking. So I guess I'm wondering, what do you think she would actually do if she wins? Would a Harris White House just be Biden 2.0 on immigration? It's tough to say for many of the reasons you just described. Harris has never been somebody that sort of fits easily into a bucket. She's somebody that her aides have said when it comes to each policy, and I think including immigration wants to lean into the nuance and also wants to be pragmatic and not worry about being described as pro-immigration

or pro-enforcement or what have you. I guess though the question is whether or not even that approach by Kamala Harris is one that's meeting Americans where they are on this issue. I mean, make no mistake about it, this is still a primary vulnerability for Democrats. After consecutive years of overseeing a record level of border crossings, we know this is something that Republicans will continue to attack her and Democrats in general on.

What we do know though, is that going into election day, in a potential Harris administration, she would be the person now faced with these questions. Throughout the Biden era, Harris has almost been shielded in a way by her limited role. When the administration was faced with these tough questions about border crossings, or about what the way forward was just for the overall immigration system, including the legal immigration system, Kamala Harris was able to say, I have a very sort of specific lane,

a very specific piece of this overall puzzle. Well, now the entire puzzle is gonna be yours if you're president. And all of those questions about the border, how you're deciding who gets in and who stays out, and also just what the future is for this country when it comes to immigration. If she were to win, she's gonna be the person

that's gonna be making those decisions. She can no longer say, that's not my job. That's right. She will no longer be able to say that this assignment, this issue is not her job. So, thank you. Thank you, appreciate it. So, thank you.

Thank you, appreciate it. So, thank you. Thank you, appreciate it. So, thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department was beginning a broad effort to curb what it said was Russia's attempt to influence the 2024 election.

Garland announced the indictment of two Russian employees of RT, the state-owned Russian broadcaster, for secretly paying a company in Tennessee to spread English language videos which support the goals of the Russian government. He also said that American authorities were seizing web domains that U.S. officials said the Kremlin uses to spread disinformation. And a 14-year-old student opened fire at his high school in suburban Atlanta on Wednesday, killing two students and two teachers before surrendering to school resource officers. Officials said that the suspect would be prosecuted as an adult.

He has been on the radar of law enforcement officials for more than a year in connection with threats of a school shooting posted online. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Claire Tennis-Sketter, and Muj Zaydi. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn with help from Paige Cowitt, contains original music by Alicia Paitou and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Ben Landsvark of Wonderly.

Special thanks to Hamid Aliaziz. That's it for the Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow. 1