The Patriot Post® · So Now Border Czar Harris Wants a Wall?

The Leftmedia outlet Axios recently published a story with the headline, “Harris flip-flops on building the border wall.” According to Axios, Joe Biden’s border czar now supports building a wall on the U.S. southern border. The evidence for her supporting Donald Trump’s signature policy? Besides a slick new ad featuring part of Trump’s wall, Axios reports that Harris said she would, as president, sign the dubious “bipartisan” border security bill that the vast majority of Republicans already wisely rejected earlier this year.

Based on Harris’s statement, Axios is extrapolating a policy position that she herself has not explicitly stated. Indeed, Axios even admits that her own campaign “says the border deal is a whole lot more than continuation of wall funding — and a tiny fraction of what Trump has proposed.”

The bipartisan bill in question, as we observed at the time, is a bad border bargain. In fact, its focus really isn’t on the border at all. As our Douglas Andrews observed, “It’s called a ‘border deal’ because poll after poll after poll shows that the border is the one issue that the American people care about overwhelmingly. But what this bill is, if we’re bound by truth in advertising, is a Ukraine and Israel and Palestinian deal with a bit of border security sprinkled in just to placate the rubes.”

In short, it was a cynical game to blame Republicans for the Democrats’ border crisis.

Meanwhile, in an apparent effort to support its headline claim, Axios quotes one of the bill’s cosponsors, Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford: “It requires the Trump border wall. It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here’s where it will be built. Here’s how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction.”

Except that the actual language of the bill does not require that a border wall be built. Rather, it simply allocates funds that “remain available until September 30, 2028” for a “steel bollard pedestrian barrier.” Supporting this view is the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which states, “Congress generally appropriates budget authority to an agency for use during a specific period. … However, agencies do not always obligate and outlay these funds in time, which ultimately results in cancelled appropriations.”

So, if the current legislation were to pass the Senate and Harris were to sign the bill into law, it would not obligate her administration to actually build a border wall, let alone the one Trump envisions. Ergo, where is Harris’s supposed “flip-flop”?

Based on Harris’s established record as Biden’s border czar, is there any reason to suspect that she would behave differently than she already has, which is to do absolutely nothing to close our wide-open southern border?

As Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt noted in her response to this story, “Kamala’s RECORD proves she is pro-open border. She called the wall ‘un-American,’ a ‘waste of taxpayer money,’ ‘medieval,’ and said it isn’t going to ‘stop’ illegal immigration. As a senator, Kamala tried to block President Trump’s construction of the border wall. As Border Czar, Kamala Harris halted construction of the border wall.” Leavitt added, “Kamala’s ACTIONS speak much louder than the WORDS of the anonymous staff she is cowering behind.”

What we have here, then, is one of Harris’s biggest Leftmedia supporters, Axios, running interference to reduce the damage from a hugely important issue and a glaring weakness for Harris. Axios is pushing propaganda for Harris despite the fact that she has not spoken specifically on this issue.

The truth is that both Harris and Trump have a record when it comes to immigration and border enforcement, and their records could not be more different. Only one has secured the border and cracked down on illegal immigration, and his name isn’t Kamala.