There’s not much Kamala Harris can do to negate the electoral consequences of this administration’s border policy except to keep quiet about it. Her campaign, though, appears to be doing the opposite. She’s leaning in.
As if to illustrate the point, the VP got doused with a metaphorical bucket of cold water on Friday afternoon just hours before she planned to deliver remarks from the border town of Douglas, Arizona. Republican Rep. Tony Gonzalez posted a letter he received this week from Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealing nearly half a million noncitizen convicted criminals are in the country, some of them outside of detention.
“As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket, which includes those detained by ICE, and on the agency’s non-detained docket,” an agency official wrote. “Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges.”
Fox News broke down the data by category, noting: “Those include 62,231 convicted of assault, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 56,533 with drug convictions and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 2,521 have kidnapping convictions and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions. There are an additional 1,845 with pending homicide charges, 42,915 with assault charges, 3,266 with burglary charges and 4,250 with assault charges.”
These are eye-watering numbers. While they’re not broken down by year, consider this summary of the border numbers under the current administration from Left-leaning Vox: “For most of the decade before [Biden] took office, US Customs and Border Protection had in the range of 300,000 to 500,000 ‘encounters’ with migrants at the southern border each year. Under Biden, the average number has been about 2 million a year, with last year being the highest yet.”
Those numbers do not include “known gotaways,” let along unknown gotaways who are not even noticed by law enforcement. It’s hardly surprising that even amid the pet-eating frenzy of the last few weeks, a new swing-state poll found Trump leads Harris by double digits on immigration: 56% to 44%.
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SubscribeFrom 2010-2020 there were less than 500,000 illegal border encounters per year, except for 2019, when there was 800,000. The Biden bill would allow a minimum of 900,000, but more likely closer to 2 million. Harris gets a free pass on all of this.
I’m not sure the Harris campaign strategy on immigration is poorly conceived.
First, the msm will simply ignore her record on immigration or flatly deny it. They have adopted that strategy with every negative aspect of Harris’s past career, and it seems to work.
The Harris campaign also likes to pin her weaknesses on the other side. Consider how they handled her obviously weird mannerisms. They accused the Republicans of being weird. So this time around they’re accusing the Republicans of causing the border crisis, they’re whitewashing her record and will behave as if time started the moment she set foot in Douglas, Texas.
This election will come down to a fairly small number of swing voters. We must rely on them to see through the immense media bias and fairly judge both candidates on their records.
It’s a risky strategy of revisionism of the current administration’s appalling record on the border, economy, inflation, housing crisis, etc., aided and abetted by the compliant and cooperative media, who will parrot the Democrat talking points.
If it works, it may be the biggest gaslighting of the American public, ever.