(The Center Square) – After being criticized by Republicans for her failure to secure the southwest border as President Joe Biden’s border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris began claiming that when she was California attorney general 10 years ago she prosecuted transnational crime and cartel violence “and won.”
While campaigning for president, she is repeating her previous call to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities. ICE is the primary federal agency responsible for arresting and detaining the most violent criminals in America, including cartel members.
At a campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona, Harris said that when she was California attorney general, she “went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers. I've prosecuted them in case after case and I won. So, I know what I'm talking about.”
A new campaign ad also states that when she was “a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border,” a claim California law enforcement officers refute .
Appearing to contradict her tough-on-cartel crime claim, at a recent campaign event Harris said she would “absolutely” close ICE detention facilities “on day one” as president.
In response to her claim that she went after cartels 10 years ago, House Oversight Committee chairman U.S. Rep. James Comer, R-Kentucky, said , “the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous border policies emboldened the human smuggling industry, empowered cartels, enabled drugs to flow into our communities, and encouraged illegal immigrants to flout U.S. laws. VP Harris must be held accountable for her role.”
Border security experts told The Center Square that Biden-Harris border actions emboldened the cartels by “unsecuring the border on purpose.” A congressional investigation identified how under their policies, Mexican cartels “seized unprecedented control at the Southwest border to smuggle illegal aliens, criminals, suspected terrorists, and deadly fentanyl and other drugs into the United States.”
Nearly two dozen attorneys general and multiple governors have repeatedly called on the administration to designate Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. It has yet to do so.
Listing examples of her alleged failures, House Republicans and six Democrats passed a resolution condemning Harris as border czar. The resolution cites former Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz saying he “never had one conversation with the president or the vice president” in the two years he held the job. It also cites examples of violent crimes being committed against Americans, the record number of illegal border crossers, more than 12 million , and the record amount of fentanyl pouring through the border.
Another House Republican filed two articles of impeachment against Harris for “Willful Refusal to Uphold the Immigration Laws” and “Breach of Public Trust.”
As a California U.S. senator, in 2018, Harris told MSNBC, “we need to probably be thinking about starting from scratch” when ICE was aggressively detaining and removing illegal foreign nationals in compliance with federal law.
In 2019, Harris introduced a bill to eliminate over $220 million in funding for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, the division responsible for detaining and removing some of the most violent criminals in the U.S.
Under Biden-Harris policies and new parole programs , an unprecedented number of criminals illegally entered the country or were released by Border Patrol agents and later went on to commit crimes in the U.S. Simultaneously, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that nearly 50,000 criminal noncitizens were apprehended in fiscal 2023, the greatest number in U.S. history, The Center Square reported .
ICE ERO agents also removed thousands of known or suspected gang members and suspected terrorists, human rights violators, and foreign fugitives wanted by their governments, according to CBP data.
Federal law created by Congress requires illegal foreign nationals to be detained, including being held at ICE detention facilities as part of their removal proceedings. The facilities are an integral part of enforcing federal immigration law, ICE has explained, including when issuing detainer orders to local jurisdictions to hand over prisoners in their custody to ICE.
Under the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations, budget requests were submitted every year to Congress to fund ICE detention facilities. While numerous examples exist, those in ICE detention include fugitives wanted for violent crimes nationwide: Venezuelan Tren de Aragua prison gang members, sexual predators, murderers, an alleged Iranian terrorist , an MS-13 gang member on El Salvador’s Top 100 list, a Brazilian military officer involved in a 2015 massacre, among others.
They also include noncitizens convicted of “murder for hire, manslaughter, sex crimes against children, assault with a firearm, battery, domestic violence, drug trafficking, possession of a controlled substance and driving under the influence.”
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