Vice President Kamala Harris was put in the hot seat on CBS’s 60 Minutes, where she was forced to defend the Biden administration over its slow response to the immigration crisis as Republicans have attacked her over the southern border since taking over the top Democratic Party took over. presidential ticket.
In her sit-down interview with correspondent Bill Whitaker that aired Monday, their discussion turned heated when the longtime journalist pressed her on why the government didn’t take action sooner.
“You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown has led to an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in border crossings,” Whitaker said.
“If that is the right answer now, why hasn’t your government taken those steps in 2021?”
Whitaker was referring to the vice president’s southern border stop in Arizona last month.
Vice President Kamala Harris joined ’60 Minutes’ where correspondent Bill Whitaker asked her whether the Biden administration should have acted sooner in its response to the immigration crisis at the southern border. She called on Congress to take action, but he pushed back, pointing out that Biden was taking executive action
“The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you actually want to fix it, we need Congress to take action,” Harris responded bluntly. “It hasn’t been picked up.”
She pointed to the bipartisan border deal reached in the Senate before condemning her rival Donald Trump for working to kill the bill. It is a topic of conversation that she regularly brings up during her campaign. But Whitaker didn’t go for it.
Whitaker pointed out that “there was a historic surge of undocumented immigrants crossing the border in the first three years of your administration. In fact, arrivals have quadrupled from President Trump’s last year. Was it a mistake to have relaxed immigration policy as you did?’
“It’s a long-standing problem,” Harris countered. ‘And solutions are obvious. And we literally offer solutions from day one.’
Once again, Whitaker pressured the vice president.
“What I was asking was, was it a mistake to allow that flood to happen in the first place?” he interrupted.
“I think the policies we’ve proposed are about solving a problem, not advancing a problem, okay?” Harris began.
Again, Whitaker interrupted her: “But the numbers have quadrupled under your –”
The two talked over each other as Whitaker tried to ask her if she should have acted sooner.
“But we need Congress to take action to actually solve the problem,” Harris finally concluded before moving on to other topics. She never responded directly to the question.
In June, President Biden took executive action to limit the number of migrants who could seek asylum between ports of entry after months of deliberation over how to respond to immigration.
The reason for this was that the number of illegal border crossings was already declining, thanks in part to Mexico’s stepped-up efforts earlier this year. But the move came as the president faced fierce criticism over the issue from Republicans, who put it at the center of the campaign.
Online, conservatives were quick to capitalize on Harris’ grilling on immigration as they sought to portray her as the administration’s “border czar.” One post called her response “nonsense.” The Trump campaign accused her of deflecting and shifting blame.
But 60 Minutes’ tough questions didn’t stop there.
Vice President Harris at the southern border in Arizona on September 27, 2024. In her ’60 Minutes’ interview, she got tense in discussion about whether the Biden administration should have acted sooner to address the border crisis. She reiterated her criticism that Congress needed to take action
In another tense exchange, Whitaker told the vice president that the reason some critics and columnists 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, but now you’re tightening them. You were for Medicare for All, and now you’re not,” Whitaker rattled off. “So much that people don’t really know what you believe or what you stand for.”
“For the last four years, I’ve been vice president of the United States, and I’ve traveled across our country, listening to people and looking for what’s possible in terms of common ground,” Harris said.
It’s not the first time she’s been pushed around since she entered the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Her changing views emerged in the debate and in her first interview as a Democratic presidential candidate on 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 for us to have leaders who can build consensus.”
She claimed that her ‘approach’ was to ‘Find a compromise and understand that, as long as you don’t compromise your values, finding common sense solutions is not a bad thing.”