WHAT THEY’RE SAYING: VP Harris Takes Trump to Task on Border Security
Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris called out Donald Trump for tanking the toughest deal to secure the border in decades and pledged to bring it back and sign it into law when she is president. The legislation Vice President Harris supports would send thousands of law enforcement officers to the border and fund new technology to stop the flow of fentanyl and other drugs – but Trump killed it because he cares more about himself than border security. Team Harris also launched a new video yesterday showing how Vice President Harris is fighting to fix our broken immigration system – and how Donald Trump is trying to stop her.
Following her remarks, Democratic leaders took to the airwaves to echo her message and call out Trump for blocking plans to secure the border. As Senator Mark Kelly put it, Trump and his MAGA Republican allies “don’t want to actually solve this problem, they just want to talk about it… When Kamala Harris is the next president, we’re going to continue working on this. It’s the right thing to do.”
Here are a few examples of what they are saying:
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Senator Mark Kelly: “Our goal here was to get this legislation passed, and then start working on comprehensive immigration reform. But this was stopped dead in its tracks by Donald Trump because he wanted to have this as an election issue… Like a lot of other Republicans, they don’t want to actually solve this problem, they just want to talk about it… I’m looking forward to seeing Kamala Harris in the White House. We can get back to doing the hard work. She’s had a lot of success in the northern triangle. I was just in Mexico meeting with the president and the future president of Mexico. We talked about that, the work she did in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala is now paying dividends. You combine that with the actions that President Biden and Vice President Harris have took, we now have a much more stable situation but what we need is strong bipartisan legislation and Donald Trump has made it very clear he does not want that.”
On CNN’s News Central, Governor Roy Cooper: “We had the strongest border bill in a generation. We had conservative Republicans signed on to do this… The Biden-Harris administration was ready to sign it and put it into place and give the resources to the border that it needs to do the right thing, to make sure that cases get adjudicated, to make sure that they had the security that they need. They were ready to get it done. They had the Republican senators and members of the House to do it. Donald Trump knew that if they got it done, this would have a huge impact on the border and this would hurt his campaign. This is all about Donald Trump.”
On MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight, Senator Chris Murphy: “[The Vice President] has the opportunity to not only run on her record of successfully reducing migration in the United States but on her clear preference for a bipartisan solution, a solution that Donald Trump did everything he could to scuttle so that the border would remain a mess, so that he could get political advantage in this election because that’s all he cares about. All Donald Trump cares about is himself, all he cares about is political advantage. He doesn’t actually want to solve problems, like the problem of so many people showing up in an unplanned way to the southern border.”
On CNN’s Situation Room, Congresswoman Nikema Williams: “It was Republicans who defeated the border bill that Republican senators negotiated and then Donald Trump decided that he didn’t actually want actions. He didn’t actually want policy results. He wanted to use politics to get in the way of delivering for the American people and protecting and securing our borders. So it was Republicans who put that plan out of place that their colleagues in the Senate had already negotiated. But then Donald Trump, as he had done in so many other things, has injected himself into the policies of his party and that’s who they’re following. We know that we have work to do. We’re listening to the American people, not to Donald Trump and what he wants to put in people’s minds, because we understand that Vice President Harris is moving forward on a path towards the future.”
On CNN’s The Lead, Senator Gary Peters: “If you look at where we are right now, actually the number of folks coming across the border are at a low for the Biden presidency … We had a bipartisan agreement, which was significant, that was coming before the Senate and then Donald Trump told his folks, don’t vote for that. I don’t want to solve the problem. I want to use this as a political issue. The American people have to know we were close to coming together in a bipartisan way to probably pass the most significant legislation dealing with border issues in decades and Donald Trump stopped that from happening.”
On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, Governor Tim Walz: “We need to acknowledge to folks that every [state] in the United States needs to control the border… The Lankford-Sinema bill that [Trump] did kill would have done that. The border patrol agents endorsed it. These are folks who know what needs to be done, but he’s not interested in solving the problem.”
