Kamala Harris Calls for ‘Pathway to Citizenship’ to End Border Crisis

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris called for a “meaningful pathway to citizenship” on Monday night amid efforts by President Joe Biden and Congressional leadership to try and reach a bipartisan national security deal that would fund border enforcement efforts and unlock military aid for Ukraine.

During an interview with CNN’s Laura Coates on Monday, Harris discussed the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, referring to it as a “long-standing problem.”

“There’s no question that our immigration system is broken,” Harris said. “And so much so, that as the first bill that we offered after our inauguration, was to fix the immigration system, which included what we must do to create a pathway for citizenship and to put the resources that are needed into the border. But sadly, people on the other side of the aisle have been playing politics with this issue.”

For the past few weeks, Biden has continued talks with the four Congressional leaders on border negotiations. The president and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries want to approve funding to war-torn Ukraine. However, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose party controls the lower chamber, has criticized the bipartisan Senate deal and said additional aid to Ukraine needs to include significant changes to border security.

“The solution includes putting resources at the border to do what we can to process people effectively, and putting in place laws that actually allow for a meaningful, meaningful pathway to citizenship,” Harris said.

Newsweek reached out via email on Monday night to Harris’ representatives for comment.

However, in the latest round of border-deal negotiations a “pathway to citizenship” wasn’t included. Coates brought up criticism over the deal not including a path to citizenship, Harris said she wouldn’t discuss current negotiations.

As Biden seeks reelection, with Harris as his running mate, the border crisis remains one of the Biden Administration’s biggest vulnerabilities, polls show. With Biden likely facing former President Donald Trump in November, immigration has been one of the key issues of the race and one of the MAGA leader’s frequent talking points on the campaign trail.

The border crisis changed the political calculus in Washington, where Senate Democrats stayed in town into the holidays to negotiate border restrictions that were criticized by immigration activists as a Trump-style crackdown. By early 2024, even Biden, who made reversing Trump’s immigration policies a touchstone of his 2020 campaign, had moved. The president told reporters that he was waiting for Congress to authorize new funds to deal with the border crisis.

As the border deal negotiations wage on as Democratic mayors are facing mounting pressure amid an influx of migrants. Thousands of migrants have been transported from the Southern border to Northern cities, including New York and Chicago. There were more than 2.4 million encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border during the 2023 fiscal year, up from roughly 1.7 million in 2021, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

Blue-city mayors now agree with red-state governors that droves of migrants crossing the southern border represent a crisis that Biden needs to address.

“Don’t yell at me. Yell at D.C.!” said New York Mayor Eric Adams after busloads of migrants from Texas overwhelmed his city. In city after city led by Democrats, mayors decried the White House’s immigration response, using lines that Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the mastermind of migrant busing, would have quoted with pride.

Harris said the “solutions are at hand” for addressing the border crisis but lamented the lack of bipartisanship.

“Gone are the days sadly where a President Bush or John McCain understood that we should have a bipartisan approach to fixing this problem,” the vice president said.