RICH LOWRY: Kamala Harris, faux border hawk

Kamala Harris desperately needs to deflect responsibility for the ongoing debacle at the border, and she thinks she knows just how to do it.

Whenever addressing the issue, she’s sure to accuse Donald Trump of killing the Senate border bill that, in her account, would have locked down the border and thrown away the key. “It was the strongest border security bill we’ve seen in decades,” Harris intoned during her visit to the border late last week.

Alas, according to Harris: “Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill because, you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.” She made much the same case during the debate.

This line of argument, meant to mitigate a key weakness, is shameless on multiple levels. There’s no doubt that Trump vociferously opposed the Senate bill. But it’s not as though he swooped in and tanked legislation that most Republicans were inclined to support. Pretty much every border hawk blasted the bill as a travesty. By the way, a handful of Senate Democrats opposed it, too.

The basic flaw in the Senate bill is that it would have done nothing to reverse, and much to further entrench, the lawless Biden-Harris policy of waving migrants into the United States, never to be seen again. The law currently says that aliens who demonstrate “credible fear” are supposed to be detained pending their proceedings, whereas aliens who don’t demonstrate such a fear should be detained until they are removed. The Biden-Harris administration has ignored this statuary scheme as it has engaged in a mass release of illegal immigrants into the U.S.

The lack of interest in enforcing the law raised the question of why the administration could be trusted to abide by any enforcement provisions in the Senate bill, not that the legislation had much teeth. It said that if encounters at the Southern border averaged 5,000 a day over the course of seven days, then the president would have to expel new illegal immigrants. The implicit message of this provision was that daily encounters up to 5,000, an astonishingly high number in historic terms, would somehow be acceptable.

Harris makes much of how the Senate bill would have hired more border patrol agents, but more manpower or resources easily could have been passed on their own, without the baggage of the rest of the bill.

The fact is that the Biden-Harris administration tore up a border system that was working under Trump, despite being warned of the consequences. The administration kept the floodgates open for years, even when big-city mayors were begging for relief.

Only when the Biden team realized the magnitude of the political gift it was creating for Trump did it pivot to a tougher posture and support the bill.

Apprehensions have declined at the Southern border, but the administration has connived to get otherwise inadmissible aliens into the country through various parole programs, which are essentially an accounting gimmick to make the border numbers look better. This is an artifice, and so is the latest tack from Harris. She spoke out forcefully against immigration enforcement just a few years ago, and sponsored numerous bills as a senator to make the system more lax.

On immigration, as so much else, she wants to be something she’s not. She’s a faux border hawk touting a faux border bill.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.