CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris claimed during a 60 Minutes interview on Monday that Congress must “act to actually fix the problem” of the southern border invasion.
VERDICT: False. Laws to prevent illegal entry and to secure the southern border are already on the books.
Moreover, since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration reversed or undid many of the Trump-era border policies; they suspended the Remain in Mexico policy on the administration’s first day in office, for example.
As a result, the southern border remains open:
- Nearly two million known gotaways evaded U.S. Border Patrol under the Biden-Harris administration, according to numbers released by Republicans on the House Committee on Homeland Security in April.
- The administration allows up to 650,000 criminal migrants and suspects — including at least 13,099 migrant convicted murderers and 222,141 migrants facing criminal charges — to roam through American communities, according to data released by House Republicans.
- The illegal migrant population in the United States was 11 million in 2022, according to Pew Research Center estimates published in July, although critics estimate those numbers to be much higher.
During the 60 Minutes interview, CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Harris, “But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration.
As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump.
Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”