Kamala Harris Now Pretends to Be a Border Hawk (Pt. 2)

Kamala Harris’ immigration policy would create more work for law enforcement, driving up federal spending.

Kamala Harris wants voters to know that she brings experience prosecuting transnational crime, but the far-left ideology she brings on immigration allows transnational crime to flourish.

As voters move to the right on immigration, she is flooding swing states with ads, bragging of taking on cartels and prosecuting smugglers. Like her newfound support for immigration agencies, her new tough-on-crime stance seeks to deal with the effects of illegal immigration without preventing it.

(Read more: Senate Dems on Shaky Ground When It Comes to Non-Citizen Voting)

Kamala Chameleon

Harris understands the national mood on immigration and is tailoring her message accordingly. This includes reversing previously-held positions and emphasizing her prosecutorial record that voters formerly viewed as a liability.

Politico notes that Harris has rarely spoken about her experience prosecuting cartels and smugglers. When she ran for Senate in California in 2016 and the Democratic nomination in 2020 the voters whom she needed didn't care about law and order or cracking down on immigrants—even violent ones. Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard effectively ended her campaign in a primary debate on her allegedly being too tough on crime as a California prosecutor.

NBC News interviewed current and former law enforcement leaders, civil rights advocates, and politicians, who revealed that Harris’ record as a prosecutor, “first as the district attorney in San Francisco and later as the California attorney general, reveals a political chameleon rather than a tough-on-crime top cop.”

Her switch on immigration rhetoric follows a pattern. Harris has taken contradictory positions—depending on the electorate she needed at the time—on legalized marijuana, fracking, and cash bail.

As D.A., she declined to pursue the death penalty for anyone, even for a gang member who murdered a police officer and an illegal alien who murdered a father and his two sons. As A.G., however, she defended California’s death penalty in court.

In 2019, she pledged to close Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) facilities on day one. Today, when 55 percent of Americans want less immigration, she supports the Senate border agreement that would add 10,000 beds to ICE detention facilities. 

Did Harris crack down on cartels and smugglers?

Harris led a mixed performance as California A.G., which was tied to budget constraints. Still, it revealed how her immigration ideology makes the job of prosecutors and law enforcement personnel harder.

A California sheriff, shown in the background of one of her recent ads, objected to how she represented her record.

"In light of a recent political ad put out by Kamala Harris featuring Sheriff Boudreaux, as well as other local law enforcement, the Sheriff wants to make it abundantly clear that his image is being used without his permission, and he does NOT endorse Harris for President or any other political office," Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux, president of the California State Sheriff’s Association, said in a statement.

He said that the clip in question occurred in 2014 when Harris visited the Central Valley after “a years-long investigation into a multi-national drug operation, with ties to Mexican drug cartels and prison gangs.” He went on to state: "The truth is, Harris never cared about the cartels and did nothing to stop people from illegally crossing the border. She repeatedly defunded and shuttered task forces designed to protect our residents, leaving the Valley and our state vulnerable.”

NewsNation fact-checked Harris’ ad claims, saying she exaggerated her role in border security and mostly focused on state-level gang and drug activities. 

Although federal and local law enforcement agencies deal directly with transnational crime, it would be misleading to pretend that the California Department of Justice played no role under Harris. 

Unlike her time as Vice President, Harris allegedly visited the border often with sheriffs, district attorneys, and Customs and Border Protection agents during her first year as California A.G. In 2021, however, Biden’s then-Chief-of-Staff Ron Klain tried in vain to find photos. “We wanted to try to find proof that she’d been there during that, but never could find pictures or anything,” he told the New York Times.

Meanwhile, California DOJ task forces arrested hundreds of gang members and seized hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs and currency from transnational gangs like the Sinaloa Cartel, the Guadalajara Cartel, and MS-13 and California-based gangs like Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia, the sureños, the norteños, and Corona Vario Locos. Harris even created a special anti-gang task force for Tulare County, which combined state law enforcement, local police, and sheriff’s deputies. 

She also created the Attorneys General Consortium to Fight Transnational Organized Crime in 2013, struck an anti-money laundering agreement with Mexico, and signed an accord with Mexico’s attorney general to increase coordination of law enforcement targeting transnational gangs involved in human trafficking.

Boudreaux is correct that Harris’ predecessor began many of the investigations that concluded under her watch, allowing her to take credit. But task forces that combatted cartels and smugglers shuttered because of budget cuts under Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) and the Democratic legislature. 

Harris joined statewide law enforcement in opposing the $71 million in cuts to her office's Division of Law Enforcement, warning that it could shut down two divisions that dealt with cartels. In her 2014 report on transnational crime, “Gangs Beyond Borders,” she noted that the budget cuts reduced the number of state task forces from 55 in 2011 to 17 in 2013, “a 70 percent reduction in field operational capacity,” and shuttered of the Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement (BNE), which had weakened the northern California gang Nuestra Familia. 

After the cuts, Harris reoriented her DOJ to focus on white-collar crimes and cybercrime. This likely led to violent crime spiking during the end of her time in office, considering 4 out of 10 homicides and 80 percent of protected custody cases in California were gang-related. 

Harris wants to treat the symptoms of immigration and ignore the root causes

Even if voters give Harris the benefit of the doubt on her record as a fierce prosecutor of gang members, human traffickers, and drug smugglers, she simply makes a decent case for becoming the U.S. Attorney General if that were an elected position. 

As president, her policy toward illegal immigration would create an additional workload for the DOJ. Her view of immigration is unethical to U.S. citizens and expensive to taxpayers. 

Prosecuting cartels and smugglers is commendable, but as D.A. and A.G., she defended policies that made it easier for cartels and smugglers to operate in California and allowed her city and state to become magnets for youths ripe for recruitment by transnational gangs. 

One such youth was Edwin Ramos, who murdered a father and his two sons, mistaking them for rival gang members. Ramos, like others, had a criminal record before committing the crime. But following the city’s sanctuary city policies, San Francisco police did not turn him over to ICE. Harris holds that someone like Ramos, who came to the U.S. illegally as a minor, is just as American as she is.

In 2021, President Joe Biden infamously sent her to address the “root causes” of illegal immigration across the southern border. She visited Central America and devised public-private partnerships to invest in those countries to raise their standards of living.

Immigration activists rightly noted that Harris’ efforts would not halt the flow of poor immigrants because foreign investment would take years to trickle down to the masses, whereas, remittances from the U.S. arrive immediately. If impoverished foreigners are allowed to easily join their co-nationals in the U.S. and find employment, then a new Nestle factory in their country won’t halt their incentive to immigrate. 

The root causes of mass immigration include domestic magnets such as sanctuary cities. When Harris’ opponent challenged her sanctuary city policies in the 2010 A.G. debate, she blamed the federal government for not “bringing them into the country legally and transitioning them legally.”

To Harris, an illegal alien is someone the federal immigration system would have processed into the country legally if that system weren’t broken. This also explains her support for beefing up CBP and ICE. In Harris’ system, those agencies would have the manpower to legally process all the migrants who would normally enter illegally.

NewsNation is correct that most of the gangs Harris dealt with as A.G. were locally based. But most were gangs that formed along ethnic lines, among immigrants and descendants of immigrants who never assimilated into the American nation.

In her 2014 report, Harris acknowledged:

Another type of transnational criminal organization is formed when criminals based abroad attempt to partner with their counterparts in U.S. immigrant communities in order to exploit access to U.S. markets and wealth. The result is a loose transnational con-federation between a criminal ring abroad and an autonomous ring here in the U.S., tied together along ethnic lines. While much still remains unknown about these groups, many of them operate in California, which is home to large immigrant communities from around the world and a quarter of all immigrants who have come to the U.S.

In a national self-mutilating cycle, more resources for the border and immigration without deportation and immigration reduction would require ever more resources for federal law enforcement to deal with transnational and immigrant gang crime. This will further drive up federal spending and taxes.

Like Harris’ plan to hire more border and immigration agents when needed, getting tough on transnational criminals and smugglers represents a worthy goal. But unless the federal government ceases allowing foreign populations to colonize communities in the U.S., it will continue creating more work for itself and a larger debt and tax burden for posterity.

(Read more: On the Border, Radical Ruben Gallego’s “Shift” to the Center is as Fake as Biden’s)

Jacob Grandstaff is a freelance writer in Tennessee. He graduated from the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.