EXCLUSIVE — The bipartisan Senate border package that Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has promised to support if she is elected president is unlikely to be revived, according to the Republican senator who negotiated the deal.
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) told the Washington Examiner in a phone call Tuesday afternoon that he doubted $650 million of border wall funding that he and Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) proposed in the deal last winter, was still available, potentially rendering meaningless Harris’s sudden willingness to spend money on a border wall.
“That February, when we were bringing this up, that’s what we had left — the $650 million,” said Lankford. “The assumption that $650 million is still sitting there, I doubt. I couldn’t tell you I know where it is, but I doubt that that is still sitting there ready to go at this point.”
The revelation came after Axios reported Tuesday that a Harris campaign aide disclosed that she would support the bill’s hundreds of millions of dollars to fund more 18- to 30-foot-tall steel barriers at the southern border — projects that were funded by Congress during the Trump administration but not completed.
Harris, once running as a liberal Democrat, has been ardently opposed to the border wall in the past. She claimed on multiple occasions while still serving in the Senate that she would block former President Donald Trump’s funding requests to construct new sections of border wall dismissing it as Trump’s “medieval vanity project.”
However, the vice president’s 2024 campaign did not directly refute Axios’s Tuesday report indicating the vice president had flip-flopped on constructing a new border wall, and she has grown noticeably more hawkish on the subject of immigration since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket from President Joe Biden in July.
At the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago this past week, Harris steadfastly blamed Trump and Republican lawmakers for killing the bipartisan border bill and vowed to, if elected in November, sign that bill into law while simultaneously advancing a legal pathway to citizenship for DREAMers.
“I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my pledge to you,” the vice president declared. “As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.”
However, Lankford voiced skepticism to the Washington Examiner that Harris had truly had a change of heart on border wall funding and noted that she and her team had never reached out to him at any time since last fall, including in the days since she stated at the Democratic National Convention last week that she would sign his border deal into law.
“She’s definitely not reached out to me, nor anyone on our staff, on this,” said Lankford.
Lankford said the bipartisan deal that he spent months brokering with Sinema and Murphy, as well as Biden administration officials including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, was likely not up for consideration any longer.
“When you get into 2025, it’s a different moment,” said Lankford. “We have no idea what the border is going to be, and I have no optimism that President Harris would enforce the border any different than President Biden has. But at that point, you’re not going to just take a bill as-is and drop it into a new year and say that’s what it’s going to be.”
At the time of the negotiations last fall and into February this year, the number of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol for entering the United States from Mexico illegally hit an all-time high.
Nearly 250,000 illegal immigrants were stopped at the southern border in December 2023, and the bill was drafted to deal with the historic border crisis at hand that has since dramatically changed in terms of demographics crossing.
Republicans revolted at news that Harris was supportive of building more border wall and claimed her new position was nothing more than a political play that she would rescind post-election.
“San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris’ fake promises to secure the border will never become reality,” said National Republican Congressional Committee press secretary Will Reinert in a statement. “The same Kamala who wanted to abolish ICE and decriminalize illegal border crossings will cave to House Democrats’ open-border demands.”
A spokeswoman for Trump knocked Harris’s behind-the-scenes policy pivot as “preposterous.”
“Kamala’s RECORD proves she is pro-open border. She called the wall ‘un-American,’ a ‘waste of taxpayer money,’ ‘medieval,’ and said it isn’t going to ‘stop’ illegal immigration,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s campaign press secretary. “How much longer will the mainstream media allow Kamala Harris to hide and use staff to speak on her behalf? It’s DAY 37 of ZERO interviews and Kamala’s anonymous campaign sources are now claiming she supports President Trump’s border wall.”
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Conservative-leaning Heritage Action for America Executive Vice President Ryan Walker chastised Harris’s “flip-flop.”
“Kamala Harris’ newfound support for the border wall is the latest flip-flop of many in her fledgling campaign, which just goes to show she’s a phony that will do anything to get in power,” Walker said in a statement.
