Harris and Walz have been making the rounds on “safe” networks. But not everyone wants to play the game.
And now 60 Minutes grilled Kamala Harris in a fiery betrayal she never expected.
Vice President Kamala Harris faced tough questions from CBS News’ Bill Whitaker during a heated interview on Monday’s special election episode of 60 Minutes. The focus? The Biden administration’s controversial border policies and whether they were too lenient from the start.
Whitaker didn’t hold back: “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,” he said, before driving home his point.
“If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?”
Harris, sticking to the administration’s narrative, blamed Congress for the lack of 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. It was not taken up,” she said.
She then tried to shift the blame to the usual scapegoat: Donald Trump. Harris pointed to a bipartisan effort in the Senate to tackle border security, which she claimed was sabotaged by Trump.
“Well, guess what happened? Donald Trump got word that this bill was afoot and could be passed, and he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. So he told his buddies in Congress, ‘K*ll the bill, don’t let it move forward.'”
Whitaker, a seasoned journalist, wasn’t letting her off the hook so easily. “I’ve been covering the border for years, and so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration,” he acknowledged.
“But 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.”
Then came the million-dollar question: “Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”
Harris, in typical political fashion, dodged the question. “It’s a long-standing problem, and solutions are at hand, and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions,” she responded.
But Whitaker, refusing to let her evade, pressed further: “What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?”
Harris, still not providing a clear answer, insisted her administration was focused on “fixing a problem, not promoting a problem.”
Whitaker wasn’t about to let the facts slide, reminding her, “But the numbers did quadruple under your watch.”
Not missing a beat, Harris quickly tried to highlight what she viewed as progress: “And the numbers today because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half,” she boasted, attempting to shift attention from past failures.
She added, “We have cut the flow of fentanyl by half, but we need Congress to be able to act, to actually fix the problem,” once again deflecting the responsibility away from the administration.
Despite Whitaker’s persistence, Harris danced around the key question — refusing to acknowledge that the administration’s early policies might have been a disastrous mistake. Instead, it was more of the same: blame-shifting, dodging, and deflecting.
Watch below:
Bill Whitaker presses Vice President Kamala Harris on President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers as part of a policy shift on border crossings, and on whether the Biden administration should have taken those steps sooner. https://t.co/l85soF5tG7 pic.twitter.com/XNnCKNnaWS
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 8, 2024
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