KAMALA HARRIS’S BORDER CHUTZPAH. Vice President Kamala Harris has two big jobs in her young presidential campaign. The first is to run away from many of the positions she held when she first ran for president in 2019. The second is to run away from much of her record as vice president. 

The issue of border security is a challenge for Harris on both fronts. Now, in a stunning display of chutzpah or gaslighting or whatever you want to call it, Harris is attempting to rewrite the history of her position on the border both as a presidential candidate and as vice president.

Harris ran for the Democratic nomination for president between January and December 2019. Mired in sixth place, she dropped out of the race on Dec. 3, 2019, meaning she never made it to the Iowa caucuses or any other contest in which Democrats voted for a candidate. Her biggest moment was a debate in which she accused rival Joe Biden of racism. After that, it was downhill all the way.

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In that campaign, Harris favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings. She also favored taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants. She favored sanctuary cities. She would have expanded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and given “deportation relief” to millions of people in the United States illegally. At the same time, she opposed virtually everything then-President Donald Trump did to secure the border, from strengthening physical barriers on the border to the “Remain in Mexico” program to detention and expulsion of illegal border crossers.

In other words, Harris proposed doing what the Biden administration would later do, which is increase the incentives — the magnet — for people to cross illegally into the U.S. while tying the hands of law enforcement to stop, or at least greatly decrease, the flow of illegal crossers.

Had Harris miraculously won the White House in 2020, she would have set off the same border crisis that Biden did, and maybe worse. So when Biden actually did set off the crisis, he had Harris’s full support. When Biden put her in charge of dealing with the “root causes” of the crisis he had caused, he, she, and everyone else understood that it was a way of appearing to deal with the problem without dealing with the problem. And that is precisely what Harris did. She took a few perfunctory actions, and things got worse.

You know what happened. More than 10 million illegal crossers came into the U.S., a number that is probably higher when so-called gotaways are counted — that is, those who entered the country while evading contact with the Border Patrol. The flood of illegal crossers has put enormous burdens on cities across the country struggling to house and support immigrants. Harris turned the border problem into a national crisis. And now she owns it.

Here’s the chutzpah part. Hitting the campaign trail, with an adoring press in tow, Harris is now claiming that she is much, much tougher on border security than Trump. “Donald Trump … has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk,” Harris said at her first rally in Atlanta. “I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week, including, for example, on the issue of immigration.”

What Harris said was extravagantly, flamboyantly, wildly untrue. And here is a way to check: Trump has actually been president of the United States. You can check his record against Harris’s. He was much, much, much tougher on border security than Harris.

Harris has also made a commercial touting her “strength” on the border issue. Among her strengths, according to the ad, is that she “supports increasing the number of Border Patrol agents,” which she says Trump opposes. However, according to Fox News’s Bill Melugin, “In 2018, Harris signed on to a letter to Senate colleagues urging them to reject a request by the Trump administration to fund more Border Patrol agents.”

The ad also says Harris “supports investing in new technology to block fentanyl from entering the country,” which the ad says Trump blocked. Everyone who has followed the immigration debate over the last 20 years has heard the claim that this or that high-tech measure will be tougher than physical enforcement. It won’t be. 

In addition, the ad says Harris “supports spending more money to stop human traffickers.” Notice that the ad is made up of things that Harris says she would do in the future — as if she has not been vice president of the United States for the last four years.

Harris appears to believe the clincher is her claim that she supported the bipartisan border bill that failed earlier this year, while Trump opposed it. But ask yourself: Why did Harris encourage and allow three years of record illegal border crossings, 10 million illegal immigrants, and enormous damage to the country before coming up with a doomed bill that would allegedly address the problem? And then, when that bill failed, Biden, who had claimed that he had no power to strengthen border enforcement, actually imposed new restrictions and used his executive authority to help ease the flow over the border.

Do you think an election might have had something to do with that? The vice president supported a virtually open border in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, but now, in the election year of 2024, she touts new measures she says would solve the problem. But she helped create the problem. The cynical among us might think she doesn’t really mean what she’s saying now.

But give Harris (a little) credit for audacity. On the border, she has the weakest record imaginable, and with an entirely straight face, she is claiming that it is in fact the strongest. It’s not within a mile of being true, but it has given Republicans a look at what they’re up against.