Fact check: New Trump ad uses edited quote to attack nonexistent Harris immigration proposal

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — A new television ad from former President Donald Trump’s campaign piles deception upon deception to attack Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration. The ad uses an edited quote to attack Harris over a supposed proposal that she hasn’t actually made.

The ad features a narrator saying this: “Attention seniors: Kamala Harris has promised amnesty for the 10 million illegals she allowed in as border czar, making them eligible for Social Security. Studies warn this will lead to cuts in your Social Security benefits.” A quote shown on the screen, which the ad attributes to the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that favors reduced immigration, says this: “Harris’ amnesty imposes large cost on Social Security.”

Facts First: The ad’s claims are false. Harris has not made any promise to grant legal status to all of the migrants who have crossed the border during her vice presidency. Though she has expressed support for a pathway to citizenship for some unspecified group of undocumented people, she has never said that recent migrants should be included. And Harris’ name does not appear in the actual Center for Immigration Studies quote about the likely cost of “amnesty” to Social Security; the center says it hasn’t analyzed a specific 2024 amnesty proposal from Harris because it hasn’t seen her make a specific proposal.

There are other problems with the ad, too.

Harris was never “border czar.” Rather, she was given a diplomatic role focused on addressing the “root causes” of migration from three Central American countries, not put in charge of border security. You can read a longer fact-check of that claim here.

And the ad’s claim that 10 million migrants have been “allowed in” during Harris’ vice presidency is an exaggeration. Though there have been roughly 10 million official border “encounters” with migrants nationwide during the Biden-Harris administration, that “encounters” figure includes people who were rapidly kicked out of the country. It also counts each attempt at entry by an individual who tried more than once.

Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director for the Migration Policy Institute think tank that researches immigration policy, told CNN that the actual number of people let into the country under the Biden-Harris administration would be around six million, not 10 million, even if you used a generous estimate that counts people let in under designated parole programs for Ukrainians and Afghans; counts people permitted to lawfully fly into the country under a program for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela; and counts every “encounter” at the northern border as a successful entry even though we know it was not.

What Harris has said vs. what the ad claims

Regardless of the number, though, it’s clear that Harris has not promised to grant “amnesty” to all of the migrants who have come into the country during her vice presidency.

“We are unfamiliar with any statement by Kamala Harris that she has promised to amnesty border arrivals allowed into the country since January 2021,” Mittelstadt said in an email.

Harris has not released many policy specifics on immigration since she became the Democratic presidential candidate in late July, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. During Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she pledged to sign a bipartisan border security bill Trump had helped to kill earlier this year, and she said, “I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border.”

That “earned pathway to citizenship” language makes clear that, as Harris has said before, she wants to provide legal status to some group of undocumented people. But here’s the key: it is simply not clear which group of undocumented people she now wants to include. Her campaign declined to comment this week.

While it’s theoretically possible Harris could eventually propose amnesty for every undocumented person in the country, various “amnesty” proposals do not cover the entire undocumented population – and many include a time restriction that excludes the most recent arrivals.

For example, when Harris was running for president in 2019, she proposed a pathway to citizenship for many “Dreamers,” undocumented people who arrived in the US as children, not for all undocumented people. And an executive action Biden announced in June, which has been paused by a judge, seeks to give legal status to the undocumented spouses and children of US citizens without making them leave the country to wait – but the spouses must have lived in the US for 10 years or more to qualify.

So what is the Trump campaign’s source for the claim that Harris has specifically promised “amnesty” for the migrants who have arrived during her vice presidency?

When CNN asked the campaign for comment, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded in an email: “Kamala supports amnesty. She always has! Has she said otherwise? NO!” The example Leavitt cited was a bill Biden sent to Congress on the first day of the Biden-Harris administration in 2021, which Leavitt noted the Democrats’ 2024 platform continues to promote.

That bill, however, does not corroborate the ad’s claim that Harris has promised “amnesty” to the people who have arrived during her vice presidency. With some limited exceptions, the bill requires an undocumented person to have been in the US by the first day of 2021 to be eligible for a pathway to citizenship. If Harris simply re-proposed this bill, the migrants who arrived during her vice presidency – from January 20, 2021 onward – would not be eligible.

The supposed quote from the Center for Immigration Studies

Asked for comment, the Center for Immigration Studies made clear that the quote the Trump ad attributes to the center – “Harris’ amnesty imposes large cost on Social Security” – is not an actual quote from the organization.

“We have many different cost estimates for various amnesties. We have done work on the costs to retirement programs in particular and that appears to be what the ads refers to. But we have not done anything specific on Harris’ proposal,” Steven Camarota, the organization’s director of research, said in a Tuesday email to CNN.

The analysis Camarota linked to, from 2021, was headlined “Amnesty Would Impose Large Costs on Social Security and Medicare.” Contrary to the quote in the ad, the analysis never mentioned Harris.

Camarota was not particularly critical of the Trump campaign for adding Harris’ name to the quote. In a follow-up interview with CNN on Wednesday, Camarota said that Harris has been supportive of “amnesty” proposals in the past, has signaled her support for some sort of amnesty during this campaign, and that “it’s very difficult to imagine” that any such Harris program “would exclude the recent arrivals.”

Still, arguing that a future Harris program is likely to include this group is significantly different from claiming, as the ad does, that Harris has already “promised” to include this group.

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