It’s been more than two weeks since Axios published a report suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris now supports spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the construction of a wall along the nation’s southern border. Axios branded this stunning policy reversal a “flip flop” in its headline, but the Harris campaign has yet to clarify her stance on the issue, the media isn’t pressing her to do so, and liberal fact-checkers claim that Harris hasn’t flip-flopped on the wall at all. So, would Harris support building a wall if elected, or not? Instead of clarifying this important point at the ABC debate last night, moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis ran interference for Harris and never raised the issue.
If Harris has indeed changed her stance on the wall, it would arguably represent the most consequential policy reversal for a presidential candidate in decades. She has repeatedly called the wall Trump’s “medieval vanity project” and has insisted she would block funding for it. Harris says she supports the failed congressional border deal from 2023, which allocated $650 million for wall construction. That’s a far cry from the $18 billion that Donald Trump requested while in office—but it’s still significant, given how the Left has furiously opposed the wall in recent years, with many calling it “racist.”
Harris has granted just one brief interview, to CNN’s Dana Bash, three days after the Axios flip-flop report came out, but Bash didn’t ask her if she supports building a wall. The Harris campaign has finally put up an issues tab on its website, but alas, it devotes just one paragraph to immigration and says nothing about border wall construction. But in a recent 30-second television ad touting Harris as tough on immigration, images of a border wall flash on the screen three times, including when the narrator says that Harris backs the border bill, which contained funding for a wall.
If we had a functioning press corps, every reporter would be asking every Democrat they could find to comment on the topic, but most are too busy trying to get Harris elected. Meantime, Harris has conducted no press conferences and just one interview with a news outlet. She has granted interviews, of sorts, but not to anyone who might ask her about the wall.
Harris granted an interview to Tik Tok influencer Vidya Gopalan, who shares the same surname as her mother. Gopalan asked for Harris’s fondest memories of visiting India, about her favorite dish in Chicago (Italian beef, she said), and what Harris was “most excited about” at the convention. Needless to say, there was no discussion about the border wall or the candidate’s other flip-flops.
Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News senior White House correspondent and former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, had an opportunity to ask Harris a question at the Democratic National Convention but instead congratulated her and asked her “how she felt.” She then tweeted out a video of her exchange with Harris, as though this exchange was something of which a journalist should be proud. Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, also sat down to record a TikTok video with the account @subwaytakes, hosted by the comedian Kareem Rahma. Once again, there was no talk of immigration. Instead, they discussed gutter helmets and the importance of putting cheese on the inside of burgers. “Gutters are a big thing, they really matter,” Walz said, before joining the host in singing the “Save Big Money at Menards” advertising jingle.
The ABC moderators at last night’s debate could have pressed Harris on her position on the border wall. Instead, they sought to frame the immigration debate favorably for the vice president by dubiously asserting that she was tasked only with addressing the root causes of migration in Central America and pressing Trump on why he tried to kill the failed border deal legislation earlier this year. The moderators asked several paragraph-long questions designed to shape how Americans perceive the topic. For example, here was the first question on immigration.
DAVID MUIR: We’re going to turn now to immigration and border security. We know it’s an issue that’s important to Republicans, Democrats, voters across the board in this country. Vice President Harris, you were tasked by President Biden with getting to the root causes of migration from Central America. We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?
But when Biden announced that Harris was taking on the role, on March 24, 2021, he said, “I’ve asked her, the VP, today—because she’s the most qualified person to do it—to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help—are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.” So Muir framed the question to limit Harris’s role in U.S. border policy, and, when she gave an evasive answer by pivoting to Trump’s opposition to the border deal, Muir followed her lead, asking Trump, “Why did you try to kill that bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.”
Davis asked one question about Harris flip-flops, pointing out that, among other issues, Harris once supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But in throwing in three policy flip-flops in one question, she gave Harris an opportunity to evade the issue. In her response, Harris rambled about how middle-class she was, about Trump’s filing for bankruptcy, and, bizarrely, about a friend in high school who was sexually assaulted by her stepfather. The moderators didn’t follow up, and Trump missed an opportunity here and at many other points to press Harris.
There may be another Trump–Harris debate, but if there is, don’t expect Harris to clarify her stance on the border wall. Instead, look at her legislative track record of opposing border-wall funding, chronicled in detail by the Center for Immigration Studies. As CIS points out, in 2019, Harris was an original co-sponsor of S. 263, legislation designed to create procedural hurdles to delay or derail border-wall construction. That same year, Harris also teamed up with other progressives in the Senate to co-sponsor S. 326, which sought to deny funding “for the construction of barriers, land acquisition, or any other associated activities on the southern border without specific statutory authorization from Congress.”
Trump could have put Harris on the defensive in the debate by recalling these stances, pointing to criminal illegal migrants like the predator who killed University of Georgia student Laken Riley, and chronicling some of her past rhetoric on the topic, including likening ICE agents to the KKK in 2018. Instead, he painted with too broad a brush, portraying migrants as pet-eating monsters who are “destroying the fabric of our country.” Republicans love to hear such rhetoric, but it’s unlikely to win over undecideds.
The Harris campaign could have pushed back on the Axios story, but it didn’t. And Harris could have clarified her stance on immigration and the border wall in the debate, but she had no incentive to do so. Unless the media does its job and presses the vice president to answer basic questions, voters will be forced to guess whether Harris has indeed changed course—or if she intends to pursue the hard-left immigration agenda that she has articulated in the past.
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