Vice President Kamala Harris was in the hot seat on CBS’ 60 Minutes, where she was forced to defend the Biden administration for its slow response to the immigration crisis, while Republicans have attacked her at the southern border since she took office. of the democratic party. presidential ballot.
In her interview with correspondent Bill Whitaker broadcast Monday, their exchange grew heated when the veteran journalist pressed her on why the administration didn’t act sooner.
“You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decline in the number of border crossings,” Whitaker said.
“If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?”
Whitaker was referring to the vice president’s stop at the southern border just last month in Arizona.
Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with ’60 Minutes,’ where correspondent Bill Whitaker questioned her about whether the Biden administration should have acted sooner in its response to the immigration crisis at the southern border. She called on Congress to act, but he pushed back, pointing out that Biden took executive action.
“The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if we really want to fix it, we need Congress to act,” Harris responded flatly. “It was not resumed.”
He pointed to the bipartisan border deal reached in the Senate before criticizing rival Donald Trump for working to kill the bill. It’s a topic of conversation she raises frequently during the election campaign. But Whitaker did not accept.
Whitaker noted that ‘there was a historic flood of undocumented immigrants crossing the border during the first three years of his administration. In fact, arrivals quadrupled compared to President Trump’s last year. Was it a mistake to make immigration policies as flexible as you did?
“It’s a long-standing problem,” Harris responded. ‘And the solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.”
Whitaker again pressured the vice president.
‘What I was asking was, was it a mistake to allow that flood to happen in the first place?’ -he interrupted.
“I think the policies we’ve been proposing are intended to solve a problem, not promote it, okay?” Harris began.
Once again Whitaker interrupted her: “But the numbers quadrupled under his…”
The two talked over each other as Whitaker tried to ask him if he should have acted sooner.
“But we need Congress to be able to act to really solve the problem,” Harris finally concluded before moving on to other topics. She never directly answered the question.
In June, President Biden took executive action to limit the number of migrants who could apply for asylum between ports of entry after deliberating for months on how to act on immigration.
It came as illegal border crossings were already declining due in part to stepped-up efforts by Mexico earlier this year. But the move came as the president faced fierce criticism on the issue from Republicans, who put it front and center in the election campaign.
Online, conservatives were quick to seize on Harris’ questioning on immigration while trying to portray her as the administration’s “border czar.” One posted calling his response “nonsense.” The Trump campaign accused her of deflection and blame-shifting.
But 60 Minutes’ harsh questioning did not end there.
Vice President Harris at the southern border in Arizona on September 27, 2024. In her ’60 Minutes’ interview she had a tense exchange about whether the Biden administration should have acted sooner to address the border crisis. He reiterated his criticism that Congress needed to act.
In another tense exchange, Whitaker told the vice president that the reason some critics and columnists say voters don’t know her is because of her changing positions.
‘You were against fracking, now you are for it. You supported more flexible immigration policies, now you are tightening them. “You were for Medicare for All, now you’re not,” Whitaker recited. “So many that people don’t really know what you believe or what you stand for.”
“For the last four years I’ve been vice president of the United States and I’ve been traveling around our country, listening to people and looking for what’s possible in terms of common ground,” Harris said.
It’s not the first time she’s been pressured about her flip-flops since running in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Her shifting stances have emerged on the debate stage and in her first interview as a Democratic presidential candidate with CNN.
“I believe in consensus building,” Harris told Whitaker.
“We are a diverse people: geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our origins,” he continued. “And what the American people want is for us to have leaders who can build consensus.”
She stated that her “approach” has been “Discover compromise and understand that it’s not bad, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common sense solutions.’