Commentary: Kamala Harris’ tough border talks mask radical immigration plan

by Chad Wolf

Since Kamala Harris ousted President Joe Biden and became the Democratic presidential nominee, she has spent the past few weeks campaigning to distance herself from the failed policies of the current administration, during which she holds the title of vice president and has been nicknamed the “Border Czar.”

Despite being part of the administration responsible for an unprecedented 10 million (and counting) encounters with illegal aliens at our borders and at least 2 million “runaways” who evaded Border Patrol, our televisions have been bombarded for weeks with ads claiming that a President Harris will be tough on the border.

Now that her party has unveiled its official policy platform, we can no longer speculate whether her outspoken immigration positions from her failed 2020 presidential campaign or her time in the Senate reflect her current positions. With the adoption of the party’s policy platform this week in Chicago, we have a good idea of ​​what a Harris-Walz administration means for border security.

The most important immigration bill mentioned multiple times in the Democratic policy platform is the ambitious U.S. Citizenship Act. The platform statement would have you believe that this bill is all about increasing low-skilled, family-based legal immigration. What the platform statement doesn’t tell you is that it is the most expansive and radical amnesty for illegal aliens ever enacted. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. Just a simple fact.

The bill’s main feature is to grant amnesty to more than 15 million illegal aliens in the country, many of whom were accepted into U.S. communities during the Biden-Harris administration. The bill includes exemptions that you can expect the Harris administration to exercise to allow convicted criminals and human traffickers to receive amnesty and put them on a path to citizenship. The legislation completely repeals the longstanding ban on welfare recipients. And the administration is doing everything it can to oppose bills that would strengthen the ban on illegal immigrants voting in U.S. elections.

As if that weren’t extreme enough, the bill would also require the federal government, at taxpayer expense, to track down and return previously deported illegal aliens to the U.S. for amnesty. Yes, you read that right. Illegal aliens who have been deported for violating our immigration laws, and sometimes even our criminal laws, would be given priority and amnesty, while millions of potential legal immigrants have to wait years for a visa.

The U.S. Citizenship Act signed by Harris also significantly limits the ability of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to deport future waves of illegal aliens. This provision is important because history shows that past amnesties, or even talk of amnesty, fuels future waves
of illegal immigration.

The current Biden-Harris catch-and-release nationwide policy has released millions of illegal aliens into American communities; a Harris-Waltz administration will go even further and be more efficient in achieving this goal. This means that the largest amnesty ever will not solve the current border crisis, but will only reward tens of millions of illegal aliens with a path to citizenship and the ability to vote in American elections, and will fuel the next wave of illegal aliens that the far left believes we must address with yet another amnesty.

This is not a serious policy proposal. It is a dog whistle for the Mexican drug cartels and human traffickers to continue to exploit vulnerable populations.

Speaking of human traffickers, it can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that the day after the Democratic policy platform was unveiled, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general released a damning report on the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in the trafficking of unaccompanied foreign children. In plain language, the report revealed that nearly 30,000 unaccompanied foreign children have failed to show up for their court hearings and that as many as 291,000 vulnerable migrant children have gone missing because the Biden-Harris administration stopped issuing official documents known as Notices to Appear.

As the New York Times previously reported when it estimated the total number of missing migrant children at 85,000, most of them end up in the sex trade or forced labor.

So while candidate Harris will pay lip service to “tough” border security measures, the record and her party platform paint a very different and bleak reality. Open border policies fuel human trafficking and enrich the cartels.

In contrast, serious and effective border security measures, combined with robust domestic enforcement, send a clear message that illegal immigration into the United States is unacceptable.

Kamala Harris falls short with her America First border strategy.

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Chad Wolf is a former acting Secretary of Homeland Security and executive director and chairman of the Center for Homeland Security and Immigration at the America First Policy Institute.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Illegal Immigrants” by John Modlin.