Kamala Harris has repeatedly said she would shut down Donald Trump’s border wall project.
But now that she’s the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has promised to sign a bill that would allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to continue building a wall along the southern border, according to a report.
Materials for Trump’s wall remain stagnant and decaying in border states since construction abruptly halted when President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris took office in 2021.
The change of stance came during her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, where the vice president said Thursday she would sign the bipartisan border security bill that Republicans rejected.
“Trump’s border wall is necessary,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) He told Axios.
Vice President Kamala Harris now appears to be in favor of Donald Trump’s border wall after saying in her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week that she would support a bill that would allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to continue building the wall.
‘The bill sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: this is where it will be built, this is how it should be built, the height, the type, everything during Trump’s construction.’
The Trump campaign responded to recent reports of Harris’ backsliding on border policies by saying she has never been in favor of protecting the country from illegal immigration.
“As a senator, she attempted to block President Trump’s construction of the border wall,” a campaign email noted. “And as border czar, Kamala Harris stopped the construction of the border wall.”
“Maybe if Kamala Harris would sit down for an interview she could explain her views on the border wall, until then we can only look at her record of supporting open borders,” he concluded.
Trump’s advisers also called the report “false” and asked: “How long will the mainstream media allow Kamala Harris to hide and use staff to speak on her behalf?
“It’s DAY 37 of ZERO interviews and Kamala’s anonymous campaign sources are now claiming that she supports President Trump’s border wall. This is an absurd and false claim. Kamala’s RECORD shows that she is in favor of opening the border,” Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in the statement.
Lankford negotiated the bill with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
But Trump was concerned that if passed, it would help Democrats in the November elections and worked with his allies in Congress to kill it.
Prior to her speech last week, Harris criticized the border wall initiative on several separate occasions.
When Harris announced her candidacy for the presidential primaries in 2019, she called Trump’s wall a “medieval vanity project.” She insisted it would do nothing to stop drug dealers and people working for gangs from entering the United States.
In February 2020, he wrote on Facebook: “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and will not make us safer.”
He also said during his first presidential campaign: “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal” and repeatedly showed his support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
Millions of migrants have crossed the southern border illegally since President Joe Biden signed an executive order halting construction of the border wall
Harris said in 2020 that she was in favor of offering migrants and illegal immigrants free health care, which would significantly burden the U.S. health care system with higher costs.
She also attacked the wall project in April 2017, just after becoming a US senator, claiming it was a “stupid use of money.”
“I will block any funding for this,” he said then.
Harris also appears to be stepping up her border hawk rhetoric in a television ad that has been running for weeks and features images of the border wall.
Trump supporters have recently taken notice of the images and are all over social media criticizing the vice president for using the former president’s project in an effort to appear to be addressing the border crisis.
Harris’ change of stance comes as millions of dollars worth of wall materials remain stuck and rotting along the southern border after the Biden-Harris administration halted construction three and a half years ago.
Former President Donald Trump visited the border in Arizona on Aug. 22 to inspect rusting materials his administration sent there that are now unused.
The ad portrays Harris as a “border state prosecutor” and shows an image of the border wall while touting the vice president’s efforts to prosecute gangs.
Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, took a screenshot of the wall images in the ad and seized on its supposed hypocrisy.
“What’s that in this ad?” she wrote in a post on X. “Looks like @realDonaldTrump’s BORDER WALL to me!”
One user responded to the post saying: ‘I was told walls don’t work… Did the Democrats lie to me again?’