Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is silent on her earlier advocacy for closing private prisons for citizens and illegal immigrants, a position she championed in her 2020 campaign and 2016 Senate race, Axios reported Tuesday.
Harris’s campaign did not respond to Axios’s inquiry about her stance on closing private prisons and declined to make Harris available for an interview. During her 2016 Senate campaign, Harris criticized private prisons as “morally wrong” and “a rotten deal for American taxpayers.”
Harris doubled down in her first presidential bid three years later, saying on her campaign website that it was “necessary to end the profit motive that drives these private prisons, as it is inhumane to profit off of imprisonment.”
“On day 1, my administration will shut down all government contracts with private prisons,” Harris wrote on X in November 2019.
Over 90 percent of the roughly 30,000 illegal immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody each day are held in privately owned and operated facilities, according to ICE documents reviewed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Harris’s silence this week is the latest sign of her distancing herself from past progressive views as she hopes to win over moderate voters with just over a month until the election. Harris’s campaign has recently walked back a number of her past positions, such as opposing a border wall, giving two million illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship, passing Medicare for All, and banning fracking.
Harris in August vowed to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars toward building a border wall, which she once derided as “un-American” and “a complete waste of taxpayer money [that] won’t make us any safer.”
Former president Donald Trump, Harris’s Republican opponent, told an interviewer in August that Harris is “flip-flopping on everything that she’s believed in for the last 20 years.”
“In history, on occasion, somebody will go back on one major policy and they’ll change,” Trump said. “She’s gone back on every single thing she’s ever said.”
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Author: Matthew Xiao
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