Harris Reverses Stance on Border Wall, Now Says She’s in Favor

Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the Democratic nominee for president in 2024, has dramatically reversed her stance on one of the most contentious issues in American politics: Construction of a border wall on the southern border.

As Axios reports, Harris – who previously condemned the idea of a border wall as “un-American” when former President Donald Trump supported it – now says she will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to construct the wall if she is elected to a full term in her own right in November.

This marks the latest example of Harris committing a 180-degree turn from a previous far-left position, including her past stances in favor of banning fracking and abolishing all private health insurance. Both stances, along with her opposition to the wall, were expressed during her ill-fated bid for the presidency in 2020.

In February of 2020, Harris declared in a Facebook post that “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.” When she first declared her candidacy in 2019, she denounced the wall as a “medieval vanity project.” In April of 2017, as a newly-elected senator from California, Harris vowed to “block any funding” for the wall, which she called a “stupid use of money.”

However, in her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) last week, Harris said that, as president, she would sign into law a recent border bill that had been agreed upon by some Democrats and moderate Republicans, which had ultimately failed to pass through Congress. Among other provisions, the bill would require the federal government to use hundreds of millions of dollars in unspent funds to construct the wall.

“It requires the Trump border wall,” said Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) in describing the bill. “It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here’s where it will be built. Here’s how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction.”

But even Lankford expressed surprise at Harris’ heel-turn on the border bill, saying that at the time the bill was being negotiated, “we never saw any vice [presidential] staff here,” describing Harris as “a Johnny-come-never.”

“I know she’s talking about it now, but she wasn’t talking about it at all before,” Lankford added.

Democrats at the time downplayed the bill’s requirement of building the wall, instead pointing to the numerous pathways to citizenship that the bill offered to illegal aliens already living in the United States. This was the primary motivation behind President Trump and most Republicans opposing the bill, as they felt it did not go far enough in securing the border and cracking down on illegal immigration.

Immigration has been consistently ranked in polling as a top issue for voters in November, and Harris has come under fire for her failed performance as “border czar” during the Biden Administration. As such, her campaign has attempted to portray her as hawkish on the border, claiming that she will support an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents, despite never expressing this opinion before.