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The Trump campaign wants voters to know that Vice President Kamala Harris claims to have flipped and now supports the Trump border wall — but they don’t want you to believe she’ll actually follow through. That’s misleading.
Neither Harris nor her campaign has indicated that she has changed her position. The thin piece of evidence on which this political bank shot rests is that Harris said during the Democratic National Convention that she would sign the bipartisan border security bill that failed in the Senate earlier this year. Trump opposed the legislation. That bill would, among many other things, allow about $650 million appropriated during the Trump administration for border wall construction to be used for that purpose.
The origin of this claim is an Aug. 27 article in Axios headlined, “Harris flip-flops on building the border wall.”
“If she’s elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border — a project she once opposed and called ‘un-American’ during the Trump administration,” the article begins. “It’s the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past liberal positions such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking — proposals that aides say she now is against.”
That claim that Harris has flipped her stance on the construction of a border wall has since been boosted by conservative commentators and elected Republicans as well as the Trump campaign. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance tweeted, “Kamala Harris is a fake. If she wants to build the border wall, she could start right now!” And Trump posted to Truth Social a video of Sen. Lindsey Graham saying in a Fox News interview, “To the people in Arizona, do you really believe she’s going to build a wall? That’s just bullshit.”
Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, released a statement in response to the Axios article, pinning the alleged policy shift to anonymous Harris campaign staffers.
“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 — this is a preposterous and false claim,” Leavitt stated. “She called the wall ‘un-American,’ a ‘waste of taxpayer money,’ ‘medieval,’ and said it isn’t going to ‘stop’ illegal immigration.”
On Truth Social, Trump posted a link to a video of Fox News’ Sean Hannity in which he claimed Harris “even reportedly went full MAGA on the border wall just this week, at least that’s what the campaign is saying.”
But the Axios article isn’t based on anonymous Harris campaign staffers. Rather, the story hinges on Harris’ pledge during her speech at the Democratic National Convention that “as president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he [Trump] killed, and I will sign it into law.” The unnamed Harris staffers in the Axios article pushed back on the idea that she had changed her position.
Harris was referring to the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, a $118 billion bill that sought significant changes in border policy. The bill failed in the Senate in February, garnering just four Republican votes after Trump voiced opposition to the bill.
The bill included money to greatly expand detention facilities, and to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, asylum officers and immigration judges to reduce the yearslong backlog in cases to determine asylum eligibility. It sought to expedite the asylum process, alleviating the so-called “catch and release” policy whereby migrants are released into the U.S. pending asylum hearings. And it would have increased the standard of evidence needed to win asylum status.
The bill also would have supplied more funding to interdict fentanyl and human trafficking, and it included $60 billion in aid for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.
And, as one of the architects of the bill, Republican Sen. James Lankford, explained from the floor of the Senate prior to the bill coming to a vote in February, it included “more border wall construction.”
Specifically, the bill states that none of the money set aside for border barriers during the Trump administration in appropriation bills in 2019 and 2020 “may be made available for any purpose other than the construction of steel bollard pedestrian barrier built at least 18 to 30 feet in effective height and augmented with anti-climb and anti-dig features.” The bill extended the deadline to spend that money to September 2028, but it does not include new funding.
The bill “doesn’t have everything in it I wanted, it doesn’t have everything in it my Democratic colleagues wanted,” Lankford said at the time. Indeed, the accommodation for border wall construction was not something Biden or his administration touted when they threw their support behind the bill.
Lankford’s office told Axios that the legislation — if the Senate version were to be resurrected — would translate to an estimated $650 million for border wall construction. That’s a fraction of the $18 billion sought by Trump in 2018. In recent campaign speeches and interviews, Trump has said he intended to build another 200 miles of new wall, but that Biden’s election upended it. At $20 million per mile, the $650 million from the bipartisan border bill would amount to less than 33 miles.
Despite Biden vowing during the 2020 campaign that not “another foot of wall [would be] constructed on my administration,” some border wall has been built during the Biden administration. As we wrote in October 2023, Biden said he could not stop some funds appropriated during the Trump administration from being spent on border barriers, and budget experts we spoke to agreed.
Harris’ Past Comments About Trump Border Wall
As a senator in 2018, Harris called the massive wall proposed by Trump “un-American.” (Trump was inconsistent about how much he proposed to add to the existing 650 miles of barriers he inherited — saying during his campaign that there should be a total of 1,000 miles, but then as president revising that to 900 to 800 to 700 and even less.) In February 2020, Harris posted on social media, “Trump’s border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer.”
In a CNN town hall in January 2019, then presidential candidate Harris dismissed Trump’s “medieval vanity project called a wall.”
CNN host Jake Tapper asked if Harris would vote for a compromise bill that included “wall money” but also permanent protections for so-called Dreamers who were brought to the country illegally as children (something Harris has said she supports).
“Let me be very clear. I’m not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances,” Harris said. “And I do support border security. And if we want to talk about that, let’s do that.”
Republicans could argue that Harris has changed her position from that town hall about accepting some border wall construction in a compromise border bill. But Harris’ stated support for the failed Senate bill does not suggest she supports every part of the bill — as Lankford said, the bill did not include everything either Democrats or Republicans wanted — it only shows a willingness to accept a bipartisan compromise. (Of note, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have contributed to the wall. About 130 miles of border barriers were built under President Barack Obama. Indeed, images of the border wall feature prominently in a recent Harris ad that seeks to portray Harris as “tough” when it comes to “fixing the border.”)
Republicans are trying to accuse Harris of being dishonest about a significant policy flip-flop. But the premise is flawed. Harris has not suddenly thrown her support behind funding for a massive wall, such as Trump proposed. She has voiced support for a compromise bipartisan border bill that, among many other things, would allow $650 million of money appropriated during the Trump administration — a fraction of what Trump sought — to be used for border wall construction over the next four years. And, we note, Trump opposed the bill.
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