New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) on Sunday defended Vice President Harris’s support for the bipartisan border legislation and pushed back on the suggestion that she was upsetting both poles of the party by sidestepping difficult issues on the topic.
In an interview on NewsNation’s “The Hill Sunday,” Chris Stirewalt asked Grisham whether Harris’s lack of response on whether she would continue building a border wall—coupled with her push for a conservative bipartisan border bill—has managed to push away voters from both extremes of the party.
“I don’t think that she is stuck. I think we’ve gotten stuck largely driven, frankly, by the Republican Party, and when the Republicans were in the majority,” Grisham said about whether Harris is stuck between these two dissatisfied groups.
The border governor, also a Harris surrogate, said the vice president is not ruling out the possibility of doing more to improve immigration and border security by supporting the bill that never made it through Congress this past term.
“She is not eliminating the possibility that it could be bolder and bigger on either side of that equation,” Grisham said, “protecting the people who are here, the folks who have followed the laws of this country once they got here, kids who knew no other country other than this one, than their own and their families, and also curbing illegal immigration at the border by creating upstream opportunities for getting visas and asylum protections.”
“That’s smart, and I want the border security smart border security,” she said. “That’s what every border state governor wants.”
Grisham was asked about Harris’s response to reporters, who pushed the Democratic nominee to answer whether construction of a southern border wall would continue in her administration.
“I will tell you that my highest priority is to put the resources into ensuring that our border is secure, which is why I’ve been very clear I’m going to bring back up as president that bipartisan border security bill and make sure that it is brought to my desk so I can sign it into law,” Harris said in response this past week, in a clip that Stirewalt played on the show.
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