By Rich Lowry
Tuesday,
October 01, 2024
Kamala Harris desperately
needs to deflect responsibility for the ongoing debacle at the
border, and she thinks she knows just how to do it.
Whenever
addressing the issue, she’s sure to accuse Donald Trump of killing the Senate
border bill that, in her account, would have locked down the border and thrown
away the key.
“It
was the strongest border security bill we’ve seen in decades,” Harris intoned
during her visit to the border late last week. “It was endorsed by the Border
Patrol union, and it should be in effect today, producing results in real time
— right now for our country.”
Alas,
according to Harris, “Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called
some friends in Congress and said stop the bill because, you see, he prefers to
run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
She
made much the same case during the debate. This line of argument, meant to
mitigate a key weakness, is shameless on multiple levels.
There’s
no doubt that Trump vociferously opposed the Senate bill. But it’s not as
though he swooped in and tanked legislation that most Republicans were inclined
to support. Pretty much every border hawk blasted the bill as a travesty on the
merits. By the way, a handful of Senate Democrats opposed it, too.
The
basic flaw in the Senate bill is that it would have done nothing to reverse,
and much to further entrench, the lawless Biden-Harris policy of waving
migrants into the United States, never to be seen again.
The
law currently says that aliens who demonstrate “credible fear” are supposed to
be detained pending their proceedings, whereas aliens who don’t demonstrate
such a fear should be detained until they are removed. The Biden-Harris
administration has ignored this statutory scheme as it has engaged in a mass
release of illegal immigrants into the United States.
The
lack of interest in enforcing the law raised the question of why the
administration could be trusted to abide by any enforcement provisions in the
Senate bill — not that the legislation had much teeth.
It
said that if encounters at the southern border averaged 5,000 a day over the
course of seven days, then the president would have to expel new illegal
immigrants. The implicit message of this provision was that daily encounters up
to 5,000, an astonishingly high number in historic terms, would somehow be
acceptable. Since the administration already had more authority to secure the
border than it was using, this trigger was unnecessary.
The
bill would also have loosened the asylum process to give asylum officers,
rather than immigration judges, the ability to grant asylum and would have
written into law the authority to release aliens.
Harris
makes much of how the Senate bill would have hired more Border Patrol agents,
but more manpower or resources easily could have been passed on their own,
without the baggage of the rest of the bill.
The
fact is that the Biden-Harris administration, with malice aforethought, tore up
a border system that was working under Donald Trump, despite being warned of
the consequences. The administration kept the floodgates open for years, even
when big-city mayors were begging for relief. Only when the Biden team realized
the magnitude of the political gift it was creating for Donald Trump did it
pivot to a tougher posture and support the Senate bill.
Apprehensions
have declined at the southern border, but the administration has connived to
get otherwise inadmissible aliens into the country through various parole
programs, which are essentially an accounting gimmick to make the border
numbers look better.
This
is an artifice, and so is the latest tack from Kamala Harris. She spoke out
forcefully against immigration enforcement just a few years ago and sponsored
numerous bills as a senator to make the system more lax. On immigration, as so
much else, she wants to be something she’s not. She’s a faux border hawk
touting a faux border-enforcement bill.
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