Vice President Kamala Harris was pressed by CBS News' Bill Whitaker about whether it was a "mistake" for the Biden administration to go soft on its border policies during a tense exchange on Monday's special election episode of "60 Minutes."
"You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden's recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings," Whitaker said. "If that's the right answer now, why didn't your administration take those steps in 2021?"
"The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up," Harris responded. "Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with a border security bill.
"Well, guess what happened? Donald Trump got word that this bill was afoot and could be passed, and he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. So he told his buddies in Congress, 'Kill the bill, don't let it move forward.'"
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"I've been covering the border for years, and so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration," Whitaker said. "But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump."
"Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?" Whitaker then asked.
"It's a long-standing problem, and solutions are at hand, and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions," Harris responded.
"What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?" the veteran CBS News journalist pressed.
"I think the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, okay," Harris responded.
"But the numbers did quadruple under your watch," Whitaker interjected.
"And the numbers today because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half," Harris continued, as Whitaker attempted to ask the question a third time. "We have cut the flow of fentanyl by half, but we need Congress to be able to act, to actually fix the problem."
