OPINION:
Political advertisements are saturating social media. Last week, the website CheckYourFact examined a political advertisement on YouTube for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The ad appears to contrast Ms. Harris’ support for particular border measures with former President Donald Trump’s opposition to them. It is a classic deceptive tactic: If a bad bill has a few good parts in it but is mostly terrible, and a politician, therefore, rejects it, his opponents claim that he rejected the good bits. It’s like claiming that someone who dislikes eating fast food for health reasons “hates lettuce” because one item on the menu is a salad.
Multiple bills in Congress have addressed the Biden border crisis, but none have made it close to passage. The Secure the Border Act, which passed the House in May 2023, could have restored control at the border, but the Democratic-controlled Senate refused to vote on it. Ms. Harris’ ad tries to convince voters that a Senate border bill that came out in February was tough, but any objective analysis shows the opposite.
The supposedly bipartisan bill was supported by the Biden-Harris administration and its architect of open borders, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. It would have made legal the admission of several thousand illegal immigrants per day caught at the border.
It also legalized the administration’s abuse of parole, failed to curb asylum fraud or the abuse of children to avoid immigration detention, and granted wide discretion to an administration that has proved unworthy of any. The Senate bill funded the network of United Nations entities and U.S. nongovernmental organizations that facilitate and fund millions of people to migrate here illegally.
The ad claims that Ms. Harris wants more staff for the border. More Border Patrol agents, Department of Homeland Security staff and immigration judges would be good if they were going toward the proper DHS role of deterring, detaining and deporting attempted illegal immigration. But not if they are going to process, parole and punt more illegals into the U.S. and run up massive processing backlogs, as Biden-Harris have done for nearly four years.
The ad also claims Ms. Harris wants to fund more drug-detecting equipment for ports of entry. No one would argue against more machines to detect fentanyl if they were in a good bill. But having been to the border five times and seen where smugglers and their mules discard backpacks between ports of entry, I can tell you that a few shiny machines won’t stop 60,000 Americans from dying of fentanyl overdoses every year. Ms. Harris might understand that if she had seen the border beyond one staged visit three years ago to a cleaned-up El Paso, Texas.
With her track record, trying to spin Ms. Harris as tough on the border while making former President Donald Trump look the opposite is a labor that would make even Hercules throw up his hands.
As a senator, Ms. Harris advocated “a complete overhaul of the agency, mission, culture, operations” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — not quite “abolish ICE,” but it captures the gist.
As President Biden’s point person on immigration, she has co-piloted the most radical open-border policies in U.S. history, with over 10 million encounters with illegal aliens at the border so far.
In addition to releasing the majority of these inadmissible aliens into the United States, in contravention of U.S. law, the administration also obliterated the legal standards for humanitarian parole to let in a million additional inadmissible aliens.
Further, their diversion of staff to the mass migration in-processing has allowed about 2 million more “getaways,” including thousands of criminals, gang members and terrorist suspects, to sneak in unidentified. The predictable results, in terms of preventable crimes, overrun “sanctuary” cities and taxpayer costs, have hit the entire country.
The YouTube ad’s final claim, that Ms. Harris locked up transnational gang members, obscures the forest with a few trees. While Ms. Harris may have prosecuted gang members as California’s attorney general and as vice president, her administration has caught, then released, thousands of members of MS-13, Tren de Aragua and other gangs who later robbed, raped or killed innocent Americans such as Rachel Morin, Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray.
Ultimately, the Harris ad alludes to federal, state and local prosecutions of Mr. Trump. This is ironic in that such judicial tactics are among the causes that Ms. Harris was assigned to address in Central America to discourage illegal immigration here.
To suggest, as the ad does, that Ms. Harris wants to “fix our broken immigration system” and that Mr. Trump wants to stop her would be true only if by “fix” you meant to end any meaningful enforcement and demolish the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.
Voters should judge Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on their records, but they deserve accurate information. Ads like this one provide no such service.
• Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow at the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect any institutional position of Heritage or its board of trustees.
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