President Biden Ends Reelection Campaign, Backs Vice President Kamala Harris

FAIR Take | July 2024

In late July, President Biden ended his campaign for reelection in the 2024 presidential race. Minutes later, Biden threw his full support behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the next President. Vice President Harris quickly responded by stating, “I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination.”

With immigration one of the most important issues facing Americans, Vice President Harris will now have to spell out her plan to solve the border crisis and restore order to an immigration system on the brink of collapse. To help our members understand which policies the Vice President may pursue, FAIR has assembled highlights from her record on immigration to-date.

From almost her first days in the Biden-Harris Administration, the vice president assumed a prominent role on immigration. Designated as the President’s “Border Czar,” Vice President Harris has strongly supported his open-borders policies and earned her share of “credit” for the crisis raging at our southwest border. Indeed, under Vice President Harris’ tenure, the number of illegal aliens crossing into the country has reached unprecedented levels. Since Fiscal Year (FY) 2021, approximately 10 million illegal aliens have been encountered by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including at least 1.8 million “gotaways,” and at least 680,500 who have used the CBP One mobile application to schedule their entry into the United States.

Vice President Harris’ refusal to stem the tide of illegal immigration even led the House of Representatives to pass a resolution condemning her failed role as the Biden Administration’s Border Czar. H. Res. 1371, introduced by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), passed 220-196, including six Democrats voting in favor. Following the resolution’s passage, Congresswoman Stefanik emphasized that Vice President Harris “didn’t just create a national security crisis, but a humanitarian crisis that has endangered the lives of millions.”

Senator Harris on Immigration

During her time in the Senate, Harris introduced a series of radical immigration bills. Some examples of those bills include:

• Detention Oversight, Not Expansion (DONE) Act, a bill barring the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using federal funds to expand existing detention facilities or construct any new facilities. The bill required DHS to present a plan to cut detention beds and “implement community-based alternatives to detention.”
• Families, Not Facilities Act, a bill prohibiting the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from considering immigration status when placing unaccompanied alien children with sponsors in the United States. The bill further prevented DHS from using information obtained during the placement of unaccompanied minors to detain or remove illegal aliens from the country.
• American Dream Employment Act, a bill that would allow DACA beneficiaries to be paid as congressional employees.
• Fair and Accurate Census Act, a bill prohibiting colleges and universities from providing any information on immigration or citizenship status of students to the U.S. Census Bureau.
• Reunite Every Unaccompanied Newborn Infant, Toddler and other children Expeditiously (REUNITE) Act, a bill preventing DNA test results from illegal aliens from being used for immigration or criminal enforcement. The bill would have also reestablished the Family Case Management Program, an Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program structured around providing services to illegal aliens.
• Legislation to provide illegal aliens’ the right to legal representation at government expense when detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Senator Harris was also an original sponsor on multiple pieces of legislation aimed at curtailing effective immigration enforcement measures that the Trump Administration implemented. For example, she sponsored legislation to rescind President Trump’s executive order on interior immigration enforcement and sanctuary jurisdictions; legislation to stop the Trump Administration’s efforts to ensure that illegal aliens are not a public charge on American taxpayers; and legislation to stop President Trump’s executive actions to prohibit foreign nationals from countries of national security concern from entering the United States.

Harris also co-sponsored legislation suspending all immigration enforcement during COVID, including deportation proceedings; legislation to remove per-country caps for employment-based visas, the precursor to the FAIR-opposed Immigration Visa Efficiency and Security Act (IVES Act); and legislation repealing provisions that allow state and local authorities to enter into 287(g) agreements to support federal immigration enforcement.

Amnesty for Illegal Aliens

Both as a Senator and as Vice President, Kamala Harris has supported granting amnesty to the millions of illegal aliens in the country and has made amnesty a core plank of her immigration platform. In a 2019 town hall, she complained: “There is no path for undocumented immigrants toward citizenship, there is no path…So, it is irresponsible to not come up with a plan.”

Not surprisingly, on day one, the Biden-Harris Administration sent the U.S. Citizenship Act to Congress to grant amnesty to virtually all illegal aliens—just as Harris had advocated for before taking office. While that legislation was not taken up by Congress, Vice President Harris strongly supported a similar bill, called the American Dream and Promise Act, which passed the House in March 2021, but failed to gain traction in the Senate.

In numerous statements and interviews since then, Harris has repeated her calls for Congress grant amnesty to all illegal aliens residing in the country, whether as farmworkers, DACA beneficiaries, or aliens with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Vice President Harris now calls amnesty legislation, like the U.S. Citizenship Act and the American Dream and Promise Act, “the solution” to the current immigration crisis.

In June 2019, then-presidential candidate Harris laid out a plan to grant amnesty to hundreds of thousands of DACA beneficiaries and other “DREAMers” who were ineligible for DACA by granting them parole-in-place. In announcing the plan, Harris said: “As president, while I fight for Congress to pass 21st Century immigration reform, I won’t wait. I’ll take action to lift barriers Dreamers face to pursuing legal status and put them on a meaningful path to citizenship. These young people are just as American as I am, and they deserve a president who will fight for them from day one.” At the time it was estimated that over two million illegal aliens would be eligible for amnesty under Harris’ plan.

Root Causes, “Legal Pathways” and Parole-in-Place

In the early months of the administration, Harris was tapped by President Biden to lead the administration’s response to the border crisis and tasked with executing the administration’s “Root Causes Strategy.” This strategy, focused on diplomatic efforts to reduce the “out-migration” happening in Central America such as crime, poverty and the rule of law. However, it did not address the pull factors – such as mass catch-and-release policies – that encourage illegal immigration and human smuggling. Nor did the Root Causes Strategy seek to enforce our immigration laws and stop the mass flow of people coming across the border.

The Biden-Harris Administration secured regional support for its root causes strategy through the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. The joint declaration, signed in June 2022 by 20 Western Hemisphere countries, reiterated the commitment by their governments “to strengthen national, regional, and hemispheric efforts to create the conditions for safe, orderly, humane, and regular migration and to strengthen frameworks for international protection and cooperation.”  The declaration continues: “We acknowledge that addressing irregular international migration requires a regional approach, and that ongoing health, social, and economic challenges of the pandemic exacerbate the root causes driving irregular migration, including the vulnerabilities of many migrants and their communities.”

Flowery bureaucratic-speak aside, the Los Angeles Declaration ultimately illustrated the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to institutionalizing mass illegal immigration under the guise of so-called lawful pathways. The Declaration specifically states, “We intend to expand efforts to address the root causes of irregular migration throughout our hemisphere, improving conditions and opportunities in countries of origin and promoting respect for human rights…We affirm that regular pathways, including circular and seasonal labor migration opportunities, family reunification, temporary migration mechanisms, and regularization programs promote safer and more orderly migration.” Vice President Harris has herself reiterated that the administration must “strengthen legal pathways for people to enter the United States.”

As part of its effort to implement this Root Causes Strategy over the last three years, the Biden-Harris Administration has established numerous unlawful parole programs to process and mass release illegal aliens into the country. These programs include “family reunification parole” (FRP) programs and the categorical parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Between January 2023 and June of this year, approximately 494,799 illegal aliens were paroled into the country under the CHNV program. Overall, approximately 2 million illegal aliens have been paroled into the country through abuse of the statute. Just last month, the administration set forward “parole-in-place” as its most recent unlawful program being used to grant amnesty to illegal aliens. Invented via a Clinton administration memorandum and expanded under the Obama Administration, the parole-in-place program will grant amnesty to roughly 500,000 illegal alien spouses of U.S. citizens.

Rather than addressing the crisis at the border and reducing illegal immigration during her tenure as Border Czar, Harris has repeatedly engaged in unfounded criticism of CBP. In 2021, building on a media frenzy and without waiting for any details, Harris responded to claims that Border Patrol agents on horseback had whipped Haitian nationals at the border by condemning the agents.  She went so far as arguing that the images were recalled the African Americans’ treatment “during times of slavery.” It was later revealed that the agents were using long reins to better control their horses and had followed proper procedure.

Interior Non-Enforcement and “Abolish ICE” Advocacy

Vice President Harris has also been a strong proponent of gutting interior immigration enforcement. In a 2018 interview with MSNBC, Harris said, “I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically re-examine [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing… And we need to probably think about starting from scratch.” In another interview with MSNBC the next year, Harris explicitly said, “I do not condone and support any policy that is about picking up, arresting, and detaining, undocumented immigrants who have not committed a crime.” In that same interview, the host went on to reference an earlier conversation where Harris even argued that the Obama Administration was “out-of-step” with immigration non-enforcement policies she pursued as the Attorney General of California. In another notable example in 2018, then-Senator Harris drew comparisons between ICE and the Ku Klux Klan during a confirmation hearing for Robert Vitiello, President Trump’s pick to lead ICE. During the hearing, Harris accused ICE of “administering its power in a way that causes fear and intimidation” and asked Vitiello if he could “see any parallels” between the perception of ICE and the perception of the Ku Klux Klan. 

This strategy to gut interior enforcement has been apparent in Biden-Harris Administration policies. Since the very first days of the administration, DHS has pursued a strategy of turning ICE into a social services provider for illegal aliens instead of an enforcement agency. The administration has also pursued a series of policy memoranda stating that aliens’ legal status in the United States should not be the sole basis of an enforcement action; limiting sites where immigration enforcement can be conducted, including schools, hospitals, social service providers and at demonstrations; and ceasing worksite enforcement efforts.

To hear Harris’ views on immigration policy in her own words, watch the video below: