From its first moments, the interview was contentious.
On Wednesday, United States Vice President Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with the conservative-leaning network Fox News, as her campaign attempts to attract voters disenchanted with her Republican rival, Donald Trump.
But host Bret Baier wasted no time zeroing in on the focus of their discussion: immigration.
He confronted her with a Trump campaign advertisement and a video of a bereaved mother, testifying to Congress about the death of her child, allegedly at the hands of two undocumented immigrants.
Harris, however, pointed out that irregular immigration across the US-Mexico border was a concern long before she was elected vice president in 2021 — including under Trump, a former president.
“I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of throwing stones when you’re living in a glass house,” Harris said in response to the Trump ad. “You’ve got to take responsibility for what happened in your administration.”
Immigration a top issue
A poll last week from the Pew Research Center found that voters in the US ranked the economy as their top issue as they head to the polls on November 5.
But rounding out the top five voter issues was immigration, with 41 percent of those surveyed calling it “extremely important” and another 31 percent ranking it “very important”.
Immigration has been a prominent pillar in the platforms of both the Democratic and Republican parties, with both sides pledging to lower irregular border crossings.
But the Pew survey found that Trump appears to have the edge on the subject, with 54 percent of respondents saying he is best able to handle the country’s immigration policies.
That is an advantage that Republicans have sought to press, as the presidential race winds to a close, with less than three weeks to go.
Nevertheless, Trump and Harris have remained virtually tied in overall voter polls nationwide. The poll aggregator, 270toWin, found that Harris has a slight lead, with an average of 49.5 percent to Trump’s 47.3 percent.
As she seeks to pull further ahead, Harris’s campaign has appealed to middle-ground voters, as well as Republicans fed up with Trump’s leadership over the party.
Part of her strategy has been to play up endorsements from prominent Republicans like former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, erstwhile Representative Liz Cheney, a vocal critic of Trump’s on Capitol Hill.
She has also pledged to appoint a Republican to her cabinet if she is elected to the presidency.
Earlier on Wednesday, for instance, that strategy was on full display in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Harris touted the bipartisan nature of her campaign as an antithesis to what she characterised as Trump’s divisiveness.
“I am joined today by over 100 Republican leaders from across Pennsylvania and across our country who are supporting my candidacy for president of the United States,” she said to cheers from the crowd. “And I am deeply honoured to have their support.”
Heated interview
But her reception was much chillier in the Fox News studio, where Baier tore into her track record on immigration.
His opening question cut right to the thrust of his interview: “How many illegal immigrants would you estimate your administration has released into the country over the last three and a half years?”
The administration of outgoing President Joe Biden, under whom Harris serves, has been persistently criticised for overseeing a spike in irregular border crossings.
US Customs and Border Protection, for instance, noted a record 2,475,669 “encounters” along the US-Mexico border during the 2023 fiscal year, though its most recent statistics have signalled a significant decline in crossings.
Nevertheless, Biden has taken measures to restrict asylum access to those crossing the border without authorisation.
“Bret, let’s just get to the point,” Harris responded, as she and Baier struggled to speak over one another. “The point is that we have a broken immigration system that needs to be repaired.”
She blamed Trump for scuttling a bipartisan immigration bill in January, which would have marked the first comprehensive reform in that area in decades.
“They want a president of the United States who is not playing political games with the issue but is actually focused on fixing it,” Harris said.
She also played up her track record as the “former attorney general of a border state”, prosecuting “trafficking of drugs, guns and human beings”.
But Baier dogged Harris about the high number of border crossings under the Biden administration — and the crimes he alleged were a consequence.
Studies have consistently found undocumented immigrants commit fewer violent crimes than US-born citizens. But members of the US right, particularly Trump and his running mate JD Vance, have amplified unfounded fears that migrants are a widespread threat to public safety.
Baier also raised a similar argument. “Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, they are young women who were brutally assaulted and killed,” Baier said, suggesting immigration policy was to blame. “Do you owe those families an apology?”
“Let me say, first of all, that those were tragic cases. There’s no question about that,” Harris replied. “I can’t imagine the pain that the families of those victims have experienced for a loss that should not have occurred.”
“It is also true that, if a border security [bill] had been passed nine months ago, it would be nine months that we would have had more border agents at the border.”
Distancing herself from Biden
Baier also confronted Harris with the criticism that, if elected, her administration would be a continuation of Biden’s.
He noted that last week on the talk show The View, Harris indicated she was in lockstep with the outgoing president. When one panellist on The View asked her if she would have done anything differently than Biden did, Harris responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
Harris was unequivocal in her response to Baier.
“Let me be very clear. My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” she said. “And like every new president that comes into office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences and fresh and new ideas. I represent a new generation of leadership.”
The 59-year-old Harris spent much of her career as a prosecutor, before rising up the ranks to become San Francisco’s district attorney in 2002 and then California’s attorney general in 2011.
Only in 2017 did she arrive in Washington, DC, to serve as a US senator, leaving her term early to become vice president. During Wednesday’s interview, she sought to turn that relatively short experience to her advantage.
“I, for example, am someone who has not spent the majority of my career in Washington, DC. I invite ideas, whether it be from the Republicans who are supporting, who were just on stage with me minutes ago, and the business sector and others who can contribute to the decisions that I make,” she said.
Baier himself faced criticism after the interview. One former Harris aide, Symone Sanders Townsend, denounced his line of questioning on social media afterwards.
“The interviewer wasn’t themselves,” she wrote. “Instead he was rude, misleading and pulled questions straight out of a proverbial Trump/Vance press release.”