Transcript of Why Harris is considering a trip to the border, according to analysts

Breaking tonight, the Harris campaign is considering a last minute trip to the border on Friday during her trip to Arizona. She's hoping to change the narrative that she's soft on immigration. A new poll shows that more than half of Americans believe that Trump would be better on the issue. A trip to the border, good idea, bad idea?

Good idea. Do it all. I don't have any objection to that. I think that at the end of the day, I think that people, when they have a question about substantive policy when it comes to immigration, there's only one person who's actually I'm serious about passing immigration law. What I have to remind people is like, Conjunction Junction. You remember how a bill became a law? Conjunction, junction. Wish your function. Of course, she had a policy position on immigration. But Senator Lankford, I do believe, was a senator who put up one of the toughest immigration bills that we've seen. It went through Conjunction Junction in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, and the person that killed it was Donald Trump. Is it what Kamala Harris wishes? No.

That's That's not completely accurate. That bill was never brought up in the House. That bill was only brought up in the House.

Why was it not brought up in the House is the question.

Because that focused more on the process to bring people into the United States versus securing the border.

Who made the phone calls to the members of the United States House of Representatives?

Hold on. Okay. The bill addressed border security. It actually had a proposal to, quote, unquote, shut down the border.

When they hit a certain number of thousands a day.

That was a Republican idea that the White House adopted. Republicans can disagree with it. It addressed it, but it addressed both sides of it. A lot of Democrats hated it, but Republicans hated it more. Here we are.

We argue about this bill all the time. We are where we are. We showed the poll. She's down on this issue. Going to the border is not going to fix that. I don't know if you all have seen the video. There's this amazing video of her from a couple of years ago out, chanting down with mass deportation. Doug was right behind her, chatting along. Her views on this are so obvious. Going to rallies and chanting, running on it in 2019, 2020. We know where she is on immigration vis-a-vis Donald Trump. Going to the border is not going to change that. The American people are going to see him as tough on it, tougher than she will ever want to be on it. They don't trust Democrats on this issue because of the last three and a half years, the day one executive orders, and then waiting until the shadow of an election to try to pay some lip service to it. It's not going to work.

Scott, I don't disagree with some of the things you said about lip service or how it's going to play out. But I do want you to understand the simple fact is that Kamal Harris is the person who's actually saying that she will sign a piece of legislation. The Republican Party bastardized people such as Marco Rubio, the Gang of Eight. Have we not been here before? They literally Were they literally excommunicated from their party for trying to come together on comprehensive immigration? Nobody believes she's going to be tougher.

One of the things about this moment, the Harris campaign has just been trying to float above it all, to float above the immigration arguments, float above some of the nitty-gritty details on some of this policy. But this shows that they realize they have to do something. One of the other things that happened today, though, is that we got some crime statistics showing crime is down. Again, this was also going to be something that Trump wanted to run on Harris against, but the statistics are what they are.

I think you said in the last segment, even though you said, Vibes don't necessarily win an election, I do think that vibes very much contribute to how people feel about issues, whether it be real or whether it be imagined. The reality is, in most people's minds, they feel like crime is out of control. I'll take my city where I'm from, Detroit, as an example. When I was growing up, the level of crime in Detroit, I mean, Detroit was always in the top three as being one of the most murderous cities in America. 600, 700 murders a year, easy. It's maybe half that now. I realize, though, the population has decreased, and that's part of it. But the approach to safety is so much better than it used to be. But unfortunately, Really between social media and people passing around violent videos all the time, no matter what those statistics say, I still think it roots in people's minds that crime is just out of control. I think we're much safer as a society today than we were when I was growing up.

I think to your point regarding social media, it's very easy to share a violent video. That those things move very quickly across the Internet. But these FBI statistics leave room for questions because there are a lot of cities, major cities like Los Angeles, that are not providing that information.

I'm sorry to interrupt you again, but I just... Because we looked this up. I've heard this before. The FBI addressed this today. Those major cities now are reporting their crime statistics.

But they dinged in 23 on these numbers. When you go to the FBI website, they're not there, especially for homicides in LA.

Let me answer what you're saying. Now they do. Los Angeles, New York, all the major cities, any city with over a million people, those police departments report into these statistics. In some past years, they reported them, but the FBI did not include them because of a reporting a crime issue. But if you look in the report, they talk about the past trends. They include that data now from those past years. The trend is still going down. So crime is going down.

But in a city like DC, the most recent crime data from DC. There have been 274 murders, it's up 35%. Robbery, you're looking at up 67%. In some of these major cities, crime is still an issue, and people are still seeing the videos because that crime is happening.

I was a long-time DC resident, so I understand what you're saying. But overall, for the country and for most major cities.

I have two points. I actually think you're hammer meat, nail on head. I think you're right. And I think Scott's right. I think Jamil is right as well. I think that Democrats for a long period of time, we put our head in the sand when it came to issues of crime. We talked about it in the way that you should, being smart about crime, but we didn't necessarily address the way that people feel about it. My mom would always say that I don't want less police officers. That's why people chose Joe Biden in the 2020 primary, because nobody wanted to defund the police, not Democratic voters. They just wanted better police. It wasn't about taking police off the street or defunding them. They wanted me to be able to come home safely while police were out there patrolling the neighborhoods. I think everybody at this table is correct that this is a serious issue that you can no longer put your head in the sand about. But I think that there are different ways in which you go about doing it. For example, Kamala Harris being smart on crime, being a prosecutor, prosecuting drug rings, human trafficking is one thing, Donald Trump abusing the law and then saying he wants to give law enforcement, particularly to black men watching All right?

Donald Trump is somebody who says he wants to give immunity to law enforcement officers, regardless of the act that they commit. Do you know how patently absurd that is? And so you have differences on policy. But the fact is, and this is a good question, and I'm glad I think we all agree See, crime is a very serious issue. It's who do you want to challenge that serious issue?

I think this is multifaceted. Can you agree? Because I'm going to agree. No, we're well past that.

That was Able.

I think Paris has some holes in her record. I think She tried to bail violent people out of jail before. She raised money for that. That's number one. Number two, she called for police to be taken out of schools. Number three, she has advocated in the past for decriminalizing illegal immigration when people come across. She has a... Once again, we're back to the same conversation. What is her record? What are her public statements? What actions has she taken? And then what is she running towards in the shadow of an election, which just makes me suspect that she wants to be tough on crime at all.

I hear you. If I was Kamala Harris standing on stage beside Scott Jennings, what I would say is that you can't... You'd be worried. I'm definitely. Some lightweight you don't worry about me. What I would simply say is you have to look at her record as district attorney. You have to look at her record as attorney general. This isn't someone who hasn't prosecuted these people and lock these people up. This is a serious candidate with a serious law enforcement record. As for sheriffs in schools, right now we're at a point we have to have that because we have mental health issues. We also have a gun problem. Until Republicans want to come to the table and When we talk about the fact that every single school shooting we've had that we talk about involves a semi-automatic or automatic rifle, and we should put a ban on those weapons, then we can't meet in the middle.

There's no automatic weapon.

But you admit that her past rhetoric would call into question how tough she wants to be. I mean, people are weighing this like, Here she was here. Here she is. What am I supposed to believe?

That's the 25% of voters right now who are saying, I don't know where she stands, and so I can't make a decision. Because what they've seen before, what she's saying now, what her past is, whether it's on crime, the economy, immigration, whatever, they've seen what she said before. They've seen where she's trying to say she is now. That's why they're saying, I don't know which Kamala Harris to believe.