Kamala Harris Says Caller Who Claimed Trump Will Put Non-White People ‘In Camps’ Made ‘A Really Important Point’

MCKELVEY: “Let’s now go to [inaudible].”

CALLER: “Hi, I’m Bobby from Georgia, and I have a question for Kamala Harris. Could you please respond to Trump’s claim that he’s going to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to round up immigrants if he wins the election? This law was last used to put Asian Americans in internment camps during World War II, and I have a sneaking suspicion that if Trump wins, he’s going to use this law to put anyone that doesn’t look white in camps, and I’m scared.”

Harris: “Yeah, so you’ve hit on a really important point and expressed it, I think so well, which is he is achieving his intended effect, to make you scared. He is running full-time on a campaign that is about instilling fear. Not about hope, not about optimism, not about the future, but about fear, and so this is yet another example. Look what he did in saying that those legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their pets. He — and by the way, the hypocrisy of it abounds because on the issue of immigration, let’s be clear, some of the most conservative members of the United States Congress, working with others, came up with a border security bill which was the strongest, toughest border security bill in a long, long time. It would have put 1,500 more border agents at the border. It would have reduced the flow of fentanyl into our country, which is killing people all over our country of every race and background. It would have allowed us to do more work on prosecuting transnational criminal organizations, which I have done in my career. Trump got word that that bill was afoot, knew it would fix the problem, and told his buddies in Congress to kill the bill, and you know why? Because he would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And he’s running his campaign in a way that he does these rallies where people, by the way, walk out and does these rallies to try and instill fear around an issue where he actually could be part of a solution, but he chose not to because he prefers to run on a problem instead of fix the problem. And we’ve got to call it out and see it for what it is.”

MCKELVEY: “But doesn’t the Biden Administration have to take some blame for the border, though? A lot of the blame? Because, I mean, the first three years y’all did get a lot of things wrong with the border.”

Harris: “Charlamagne, within hours of being inaugurated, the first bill we passed before we did the Inflation Reduction Act, before we did the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, before we did the — the Safer Communities Act to deal with gun violence, first thing we dropped was a bill to fix the broken immigration system which, by the way, Trump did not fix when he was president. And you can look at every step along the way. We then tightened up the asylum application process. We then worked with what we needed to do to secure ports of entry. We did a number of things, including what we did to try and get that border security bill passed and then also an executive order that has actually reduced significantly the number of illegal crossings and tightened up what needs to happen in between ports of entry. But no, we’ve been working on it ever since. But — “

MCKELVEY: “So what went wrong? Because something had to go wrong.”

Harris: “But here’s — here’s — here’s what has to happen. Congress has to act to fix the immigration system, and it has been broken for a long time. Congress has to act, but it does not help when finally a bipartisan group got together to fix it and Donald Trump told them hold on, don’t do that because it won’t — it won’t help me politically.”