SAUNDERS: Kamala Harris in full sprint to the right on border security

WASHINGTON

In Las Vegas over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris offered, “I was attorney general of a border state.”

Her language conjures an image of a law woman wearing spurs and squinting southward as the sun sets.

Harris does not brag that she would be great on border security because she was the attorney general of California — because that’s when reality sets in.

California Democrats have been notorious in their opposition to robust federal immigration enforcement. So with Joe Biden in the White House and Kamala Harris by his side, it should come as no surprise that some 8 million unauthorized migrants crossed the border under their watch.

Nonetheless, Harris’ presidential campaign has a new ad with an unbelievable slogan: “Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.”

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, likes to point out that Harris hails from San Francisco, which was an early adopter of sanctuary city policies in 1989.

Elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2004, Harris supported the city’s sanctuary policy, which juvenile probation staff had determined could be used to shield serious offenders under age 18 from federal immigration authorities.

Some gang members from Central America figured out that they didn’t have to prove they were minors. In 2008, then-San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken found that 30 percent of undocumented offenders who claimed to be under 18 actually were adults.

In 2009, the Los Angeles Times reported that Back on Track, her jobs training program for low-level, drug-trafficking offenders, was open to illegal immigrants even though they were not eligible to work legally in the United States.

Harris said the decision to allow illegal immigrants into the program was a “flaw in the design,” which she then fixed.

But the real flaw was in Harris’ view that it was her role to check what ICE officials did.

In 2016, as she ran for the U.S. Senate, Harris called immigration one of the “civil rights issues of our time,” and proposed getting rid of the term “illegal alien.”

In 2017, Harris said, “It is wrong to somehow suggest that an undocumented immigrant is a criminal.”

In 2018, Harris said she wanted “to critically re-examine ICE and its role and the way it is being administered and what it’s doing.”

In 2019, as a presidential hopeful, Harris said she wanted to close migrant detention centers “on day one.”

Then three years of surges brought 8 million migrants across the border after they were drawn by executive orders signed by Biden. This year, the president was forced to sign a new order to end to his own open-door approach. Rather than admit that the burst in new migrants was the result of that policy, Biden and Harris blame Republicans for not passing a bill to override the administration’s own executive actions.

It must be tough pointing fingers at others while pretending you had nothing to do with your own policies.

It’s time for a new narrative, so big media have a new consensus story: Harris may have run for the White House in 2019 as a “progressive prosecutor,” but today she is a moderate. You can read all about it in The Atlantic, Time Magazine and The New York Times.

As a former Bay Area resident, I get it. Californians live in a bubble. New Yorkers and beltway insiders, too. They also view House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi as a moderate. They have no idea how their progressive politicians and their enforcement-lite policies look to much of the country.

Terms I would use to describe Harris and others with her approach to immigration law would include left-wing, extreme and, given the enthusiasm for undermining laws passed by elected officials, undemocratic.

Contact Review-Journal Washington Columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.