OAN Staff James Meyers
3:51 PM – Tuesday, September 10, 2024
A new report highlighted by CNN says that in 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris supported cutting funds to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and that she backed spending taxpayer dollars on gender reassignment surgeries for detained migrants and prisoners.
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Her responses stemmed from a questionnaire conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union, but did not receive much attention until it came back into light in a recent report by CNN.
The survey also revealed that Harris had also supported decriminalizing drugs at the time, which is ironic, given the fact that she is responsible for putting more than a handful of individuals, the majority of them people of color (POC), in state prison and jails for non-violent marijuana offences during her time as a prosecutor in California.
“From a cannabis reform POV, [Biden] just made the worst pick possible,” said Steve DeAngelo, founder of the criminal justice reform group Last Prisoner Project, after Biden chose Harris to be his running mate. ”Cannabis voters should know that Harris took money and support from us in her race for CA AG, then did zero to defend CA when the DOJ attacked us. Then she laughed about it.”
Trump’s 2024 press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, also commented on the recent report.
“Kamala’s support for the decriminalization of all drugs will worsen the drug epidemic in this country leading to more overdoses, deaths, homelessness and heartbreak,” Leavitt said. “Kamala’s plan to fund sex change surgeries for illegal immigrants is absolutely insane and unfair to American taxpayers,” she added. “Kamala Harris is dangerously liberal.”
However, Harris has recently walked back progressive policy positions, which includes her opposition to fracking and support for electric vehicle (EV) mandates. Yet, she has not actually gone on record to explain why she changed her position on a number of matters.
Additionally, in an interview on August 29th, the vice president told CNN’s Dana Bash that “the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed.”
Harris was sworn in as a United States Senator for California in 2017, according to nul.org. She stated that she could use executive power “as president” to ensure transgender and non-binary people “including those in prison and immigration detention” get access to “all necessary surgical care.”
“I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained,” she wrote.
“Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.”
Furthermore, Harris declared back then that she would support decriminalization of “all drug possession for personal use” at the federal level.
“[I] believe it is long past time that we changed our outdated and discriminatory criminalization of marijuana,” Harris wrote during her earlier campaign. “Throughout my career I have supported treating drug addiction as a public health issue.”
“This past year, the number of overdose deaths in the United States declined for the first time in five years,” the Harris-Waltz campaign page says. “As President, she will sign the bipartisan border bill that will fund detection technology to intercept even more illicit drugs and she’ll keep fighting to end the opioid epidemic.”
Harris has also shown support for getting rid of the Hyde Amendment, a 1970s era policy that prohibits the use of federal dollars (taxpayer funds) for abortion.
However, supporters of the Hyde Amendment argue that it is a beneficial thing, as it ensures that taxpayers do not have to foot the bill for the general public’s abortion procedures, which goes against many people’s religious beliefs, as well as the issue pertaining to the personal negligence of both the man and woman involved.
“Restricting the options that women have to obtain and pay for an abortion is effectively infringing on their reproductive rights. We need to eliminate the Hyde amendment and ensure that all insurers are required to provide full reproductive healthcare services,” Harris said.
There were also some questions that Harris did not answer in the questionnaire form the ACLU. Some included whether she would commit to “reducing incarceration by 50% in the federal prison system,” release 25,000 inmates from federal prisons, issue federal guidance on “advising police to use deadly force,” and reduce the “immigration detention system by at least 75%.”
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