Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to answer as she was grilled over whether she thought it was a ‘mistake’ to allow a ‘flood’ of illegal migrants into the U.S. during an evasive 60 Minutes interview.
The Democratic nominee was put in the hot seat when host Bill Whitaker asked her why it took three-and-a-half years for the Biden administration to bring in tougher restrictions to fix the immigration.
Harris dodged the question as Whitaker kept pressing on whether she regretted letting border crossings ‘quadruple’ during her first three years in the White House.
Despite promising ‘solutions’ on day one if she is elected and blaming Congress for not passing legislation, Whitaker wasn’t satisfied and continued to interrogate her in a tense exchange in the Monday night primetime interview.
‘You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings,’ Whitaker said.
‘If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?’
Whitaker was referring to the vice president’s stop at the southern border just last month in Arizona.
Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with ’60 Minutes’ where correspondent Bill Whitaker grilled her on whether the Biden administration should have acted sooner in its response to the immigration crisis at the southern border. She called on Congress to act, but he pushed back pointing out Biden took executive action
‘The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act,’ Harris responded flatly. ‘It was not taken up.’
She pointed to the bipartisan border deal reached in the Senate before slamming her rival Donald Trump for working to kill the bill. It is a talking point she frequently brings up on the campaign trail. But Whitaker did not go for it.
Whitaker pointed out ‘there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?’
‘It’s a longstanding problem,’ Harris pushed back. ‘And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.’
Again Whitaker pressed the vice president.
‘What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?’ he interrupted.
‘I think– the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, okay?’ Harris started.
Again Whitaker cut her off: ‘But the numbers did quadruple under your –’
The two spoke over each other as Whitaker tried to ask her if she should have acted sooner.
‘But we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem,’ Harris finally finished before they moved on to other topics. She never directly responded to the question.
In June, President Biden took executive action to limit the number of migrants who could claim asylum between ports of entry after deliberating for months over how to act on immigration.
It came as illegal border crossings were already ticking down due in part to stepped up efforts by Mexico earlier this year. But the move came as the president was facing fierce criticism over the issue by Republicans who put it front and center on the campaign trail.
Online, conservatives were quick to seize on Harris’ grilling over immigration as they have attempted to paint her as the administration’s ‘border czar.’ One posted calling her response ‘nonsense.’ The Trump campaign accused her of deflecting and shifting blame.
But the tough questioning by 60 Minutes did not stop there.
Vice President Harris at the southern border in Arizona on September 27, 2024. In her ’60 Minutes’ interview she got in a tense exchange over whether the Biden administration should have acted sooner to address the border crisis. She reiterated her criticism that Congress needed to act
In another tense exchange, Whitaker told the vice president the reason some critics and columnist say voters don’t know her is because of her changing positions.
‘You were against fracking, now you’re for it. You supported looser immigration policies, now you’re tightening them up. You were for Medicare for All, now you’re not,’ Whitaker rattled off. ‘So many that people don’t truly know what you believe or what you stand for.’
‘In the last four years I have been vice president of the United States, and I have been traveling our country, and I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground,’ Harris stated.
It is not the first time she has been pressed on her flip-flops since running in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Her changing stances have come up on the debate stage and in her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee with CNN.
‘I believe in building consensus,’ Harris told Whitaker.
‘We are a diverse people: geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds,’ she continued. ‘And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus.’
She claimed her ‘approach’ has been to ‘figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions.’
In another moment release from their interview but not aired during the special, Whitaker also asked Harris about Biden stepping down and ‘handing’ her a nomination and not having to go through the primary process.
It is another aspect of her campaign Harris has been criticized by Trump supporters for. Whitaker told her directly ‘that’s not really the way our system was intended to work.’
The vice president responded by saying history will show the president made a rare decision as a leader to ‘put country before self.’
‘I’m proud to have earned the support of the vasts majority of delegates and to have been elected the Democratic nominee,’ Harris said. ‘I am proud to have received the endorsement of leaders around this country from every background and walk of life to fight in this election over the next month for our democracy.’
Whitaker countered that he thinks the quick process is why people say they don’t really know who she is.
‘Look, I’ve been in this race for seventy days,’ Harris responded. ‘It is without any question a short period of time which is why I’m traveling around our country from one state to the next to the next.’
She said it is her responsibility to ‘earn the vote’ and vowed she will ‘work to do that.’
