Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris’ impact on border policy and the latter’s work in California on immigration took center stage as her policies as state attorney general and at the national level as in the Biden administration over the past three-and-a-half years were questioned by GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance as he sparred with his rival Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on CBS’s debate in New York on Tuesday night.
In the first half hour of the debate, Vance was asked whether a second Trump administration would separate children from their parents, a policy implemented by the former president that was dropped after a massive backlash. Vance replied by blaming Harris for the policies of the Biden administration.
“We have a historic immigration crisis because Kamala Harris started and said that she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s order policies — 94 executive orders, suspending deportations, decriminalizing illegal aliens, massively increasing the asylum fraud that exists in our system that has opened the floodgates, and what it’s meant is that a lot of fentanyl is coming into our country,” Vance replied.
President Joe Biden assigned VP Harris to lead U.S. diplomatic efforts and work alongside Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to look at root causes and stem migration from these countries into the United States. In 2021, Republicans dubbed her the “border czar,” suggesting that she was tasked with controlling the southern border; that false notion has now been revived this election cycle.
In his reply, Walz, who as governor of Minnesota governor signed legislation making undocumented immigrants eligible for driver’s licenses and low-income health insurance marketplace, championed Harris’ work in California as attorney general.
“Kamala Harris was the attorney general of the largest state, a border state, in California. She’s the only person in this race who prosecuted transnational gangs for human trafficking and drug interventions. But look, we all want to solve that. Most of us want to solve this — and that is the United States Congress; that’s the Border Patrol agents; that’s the Chamber of Commerce; that’s most Americans out here. That’s why we had the fairest and the toughest bill on immigration that this nation has ever seen,” Walz said, then reminding Vance and the audience that Trump worked to shut the bill down during his presidency because it works in his favor as a polarizing election issue.
Both of the candidates dodged questions in this back-and-forth: Vance never answered the question about family separation and Walz punted when subsequently questioned about mass deportations—a question he’d likely rather avoid as poll numbers show that Americans are increasingly in favor of this as a solution to the border crisis.
When pressed to answer the question on child separation policy again by moderator Margaret Brennan, Vance did not say if this would be reimplemented and again blamed Harris for the border crisis.
“My point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to an open border. I didn’t accuse Kamala Harris of inviting drug mules. I said that she enabled the Mexico to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules, and it is a disgrace, and it has to stop,” Vance said.
Walz managed to pivot the immigration debate to the topic that emerged from the presidential debate last month of allegations of immigrations eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. This was a story latched onto by Vance and then amplified by Trump while debating Harris. It has been debunked, yet persisted as a story and has grabbed headlines for weeks.
“We could come together and solve this if we didn’t let Donald Trump continue to make it an issue,” Walz said. “And the consequences in Springfield were the governor had to send state law enforcement to escort kindergartners to school by standing with Donald Trump and not working together to find a solution…when it becomes a talking point like this, we dehumanize and villainize other human beings.”
