Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, once openly stated that she considered the biggest problem with the southern border to be pollution, not mass migration.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, then-Senator Kamala Harris was part of a group of California Democrats who called on then-President Donald Trump to address an alleged “ongoing pollution crisis along California’s border with Mexico.”

“Over the past couple of months, the region has experienced several cross-boundary flows, totaling millions of gallons of treated and untreated wastewater flowing into the United States and affecting our constituents,” the lawmakers’ statement read.

The statement from five years ago has resurfaced as Republicans focus on Harris’ role as the Biden Administration’s “border czar,” a new position to which Joe Biden appointed her in response to the surge of third-world migration due to his open-border policies. During her time as border czar, Harris said that she would address the “root causes” of mass migration, which she claimed included pollution and global warming.

Following Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election and Harris becoming the presumptive nominee, the mainstream media has repeatedly tried to scrub past mentions of her role as border czar, now claiming that Harris never actually served in such a role. Harris openly voiced her support for open borders, mass amnesty, and free healthcare for illegal aliens during her failed 2020 presidential campaign, often taking positions even further left than Biden.

Now, with her record on immigration being called out by President Trump and Republican surrogates, Harris has attempted to backtrack on the subject. Her campaign released a new ad falsely claiming that she “supports increasing the number of Border Patrol agents.” Back in 2018, however, then-Senator Harris issued a statement calling for Democrats in the Senate to freeze any further funding for the hiring of “new Border Patrol agents,” as well as further construction of the border wall and hiring more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel.

Harris also referred to President Trump’s efforts to build a border wall as a “stupid use of money,” and once falsely accused ICE of “crimes against humanity.”