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Highlighting the Human Dimension
While the GOP ticket cynically exploits ordinary people to push an anti-immigrant agenda, Kamala Harris approaches policy with heart
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Kamala Harris’ made a touching observation Tuesday. But amid the hostile rhetorical warfare her rivals have pursued—demonizing immigrants and lying about the dangers such non-citizens portend for the coming election—it was easy to miss. Asked by Politico White House correspondent Eugene Daniels about the “racist conspiracy theories” that have led to bomb threats and school evacuations in Springfield, Ohio, the vice president took her time to give a human response.
“It’s a crying shame,” she began, speaking to a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). And then she painted a picture: “There were children, elementary school children [for] who it was school photo day. You remember what that’s like? Going to school on picture day? Who dressed up in their best, got all ready, knew what they were going to wear the night before and had to be evacuated. Children. Children. A whole community put in fear.”
Then she turned to the abuse of power that created these terrible days for as many as 15,000 Haitian immigrants who have legally come to the United States and have—by all accounts, including from Ohio’s GOP Gov. Mike DeWine—worked hard to make a life for themselves and contribute to an Ohio town that had jobs to fill. She didn’t directly address the fiction of Black, pet-eating immigrants by fear-mongering Donald Trump and JD Vance or even the reality that Trump-supporting extremists like the Proud Boys have been marching in the Springfield streets and exacerbating the climate of fear.
Instead, she emphasized the responsibility that must go with a powerful platform. “When you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand at a very deep level how much your words have meaning,” she said. “There is a profound responsibility that comes with that….I learned at a very young stage of my career [as a prosecutor] that the meaning of my words could impact whether somebody was free or in prison.”
Harris did not shy away from talking about this pattern of behavior, that is, “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old.” She also didn’t hesitate discussing specific examples in Trump’s history, including his refusal to rent to black families, the full-page ad in The New York Times urging the execution of the Central Park Five who were later exonerated or his racist misrepresentation of Barack Obama’s heritage which Harris characterized as “referring to the first Black President of the United States with a lie.”
She summed up her thoughts like this: “We’ve got to say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the President of the United States of America engaging in that hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country, is designed to have people pointing fingers at each other.”
But notice where Harris began. She reflected on the concrete and personal ways this ugly political combat is harming ordinary people. It’s not the first time she’s done that; think of her asking people to remember what life was like before there was affordable health care coverage to protect patients with pre-existing conditions. But it says a lot about how she approaches policy and how vividly it contrasts with the cruel, cynical and exploitative methods of her rival.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” JD Vance told CNN this week (using language like “cat memes” to minimize their darker intentions). Spreading these baseless claims meant ignoring what Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck told him: “He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’ I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true.”
But truth doesn’t matter when you’re trying to fuel anti-immigrant passions and justify a policy plan for mass deportation. How easy it was for Vance this week to call legally admitted Haitians “illegal aliens.” How easy it was for Trump to ignore their legal status and push his hateful agenda: “We're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we're going to start with Springfield and Aurora [Colorado]."
(In fact, Haitians are among a group of nationalities—including Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans—given a legal pathway into the U.S. to help decrease border pressure. In this program, they are vetted and must have a U.S. sponsor before being authorized to travel and enter the country.)
And just to underscore his false bravery, Trump threatened to visit Springfield soon, causing the city’s mayor to ask that he stay away. “It would be an extreme strain on our resources,” Mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, said diplomatically. “So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit.”
But let’s be blunt about what Trump and Vance are doing: The hell with the good people of Springfield when you’re busy spreading lies, pushing for mass deportation of unwanted immigrants, and relentlessly and falsely claiming that undocumented immigrants are voting and affecting the outcome of our elections. “When [Kamala Harris] let in millions of illegal aliens,” Vance told a rally in Michigan last month, “it made our communities less safe—but it did give the Democrats a lot of voters.”
As for the facts that contradict this aggressive disinformation? A 1996 federal law makes it illegal for noncitizens to vote for president or members of Congress. A noncitizen who violates this law can be fined, imprisoned for up to a year or even deported.
And the number of noncitizens who violate this law? Almost nonexistent. An exhaustive study of the 2016 election by the Brennan Center of Justice looked at 42 jurisdictions involving 23.5 million votes and found just 30 cases of possible noncitizen voting requiring further investigation.
But that didn’t stop Trump then: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he said as president-elect, adding, “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD.”
The utter fallaciousness of noncitizen immigrant voting also didn’t stop Trump from spreading that lie in 2020, and it continues to be a lie told by Trump and Vance as we head toward the 2024 election. They are clearly determined now to peddle the idea of a rigged election to set up Trump’s inevitable claim that the election was stolen from him again—no matter how many lives in Springfield or around the country they harm in the process.
In recent days, Trump and his Republican allies have filed eight lawsuits—with little evidence of fraud—to challenge voter registration procedures in four of seven battleground states. Just on Wednesday, Trump was demanding legislation that he falsely claimed is needed to protect against noncitizen voting; so what if attaching the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to the government spending bill could lead to a government shutdown? “Democrats are registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak,” he lied on Truth Social.
That version of the government spending bill, which included SAVE to restrict voting access, failed to pass Wednesday. But let’s not doubt there will be more lies, more subterfuge, more distractions and more incendiary rhetoric intended to fuel the cult and certain to cause more harm to ordinary, innocent immigrants just trying to get by.
As VP Harris put it this week on stage with the NABJ, “This is exhausting and it’s harmful and it’s hateful…It’s a crying shame. I mean, my heart breaks.”
And it’s a reminder of the necessity for us all to do what we can to get out the vote. An overwhelming defeat of Donald Trump is the clearest way to refute the lies to come and welcome in a heartfelt Madam President.
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