Harris campaign releasing new ad featuring her closing statement from ABC News debate
(NEW YORK) — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is releasing a new ad on Friday featuring her closing statement from the ABC News debate when she called for unity and committed to serving all Americans.
The campaign said its live focus group of undecided battleground voters during Tuesday’s debate found those moments to be some of Harris’ strongest.
The news of the ad was first shared with ABC News.
Since the debate, the Harris team says it has been strategizing ways to capitalize on her momentum. The campaign says it has aimed to highlight moments from the debate that underscore the contrast with former President Donald Trump, as well as his answers they found most concerning — including what he said on abortion and Jan. 6, 2021, when an angry mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.
(WASHINGTON) — Less than two hours after President Joe Biden last week announced his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, the Republican National Committee released a two-minute campaign ad blasting Vice President Kamala Harris as “dangerously liberal” and claiming she “was liberal on illegal immigration before she ever reached the White House.”
The ad highlighted the 2008 story of a San Francisco woman who was attacked by a man who was in the country illegally and had been arrested months earlier on drug charges — but was released as part of a new program that had been launched by Harris, then the city’s district attorney.
Now, as Harris tries to frame her campaign against former President Donald Trump as a choice between a tough prosecutor and a convicted felon, the victim of the 2008 assault, Amanda Kiefer, is calling that message from Harris “laughable.”
“When a policy negatively affects you, you wake up,” Keifer, now 45, told ABC News, speaking about her experience publicly for the first time in 15 years.
According to the RNC ad, Harris “allowed illegal immigrant drug dealers to enter job training” instead of entering prison.
The program, called Back on Track, was billed as a “smart on crime” initiative that could reduce rates of recidivism by empowering lower-level nonviolent offenders to redirect their lives away from crime. Offenders who received job training and completed the program had their records expunged.
A spokesperson for Harris declined to comment on the record for this story.
‘Most Americans would disapprove’
In July 2008, when Kiefer was 29, she was walking with a group of friends in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco when 20-year-old Alexander Izaguirre stole her purse and jumped into a waiting SUV. The driver of the vehicle then attempted to run Kiefer down, leaving her with a fractured skull.
“If people who committed crimes were allowed to stay out of prison to train for jobs they couldn’t legally hold, I think most Americans would disapprove of that,” Kiefer told ABC News.
Harris seemed to agree with that even 15 years ago, telling the Los Angeles Times then that “the whole point of the program [was] … to obtain and hold down lawful employment” — and that someone in the country illegally “probably would not be able to do that, so it would go against the very spirit of the program.”
“I believe we fixed it,” Harris said of the loophole at the time. “So moving forward, it is about making sure that no one enters Back on Track if they cannot hold legal employment.”
In total, fewer than a dozen undocumented immigrants gained entry into the program, which reportedly became a model for other law enforcement agencies around the country.
Even so, Trump and his supporters are now seeking to reintroduce Kiefer’s story to counter the vice president’s tough-on-crime posture and to feed into the false narrative that undocumented immigrants have contributed to a spike in crime nationwide, which is contradicted by statistics showing that U.S.-born citizens are more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes than people who are in the country illegally.
Harris’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
It’s not the first time Harris has faced those accusations. During his unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, Trump used Kiefer’s story to attack Harris and what he alleged was her support for “deadly sanctuary cities.”
“As district attorney in San Francisco, Kamala put a drug-dealing illegal alien into a jobs program instead of into prison. Four months later, the illegal alien robbed a 29-year-old woman, mowed her down with an SUV, fracturing her skull and ruining her life,” Trump said at an August 2020 campaign stop in Old Forge, Pennsylvania. “We believe our country should be a sanctuary for law abiding Americans, not for criminal aliens.”
A ‘red pill moment’
Since becoming the Democratic party’s de-facto nominee, Harris has shied away from discussing the Southwest border, which under the Biden administration saw unprecedented levels of migrant crossings before the numbers began to drop in April.
According to Customs and Border Protection, its agents and officers have encountered more than 8.4 million migrants along the Southwest border since the Biden administration took office — more than four times the amount during the Trump administration. Under Biden, an additional 2 million or so border-crossers were reportedly detected but never captured.
But apprehension rates have dropped significantly in the past two months after the Biden administration announced new asylum restrictions. Government statistics released last week show that migrant encounters along the Southwest border fell by 55% since the restrictions took effect, with June seeing the lowest number of border encounters of any month in the last three years.
Harris, for her part, has continued to press for progressive solutions to both criminal justice and immigration enforcement.
As for Kiefer, the violent assault she suffered was what she called her “red pill moment” — a reference to a pill in the movie “The Matrix” that grants users the ability to see harsh realities.
A self-professed liberal at the time, Kiefer says she now supports the policies of Trump. Government records show she has supported other conservative efforts in recent years, donating small-dollar amounts to Republican causes 17 times since 2020.
Trump earlier this year touted his role in pushing key Republicans to defeat a bipartisan Senate bill that its supporters say would have helped beef up border security and immigration enforcement. Trump described the bill as a political play by Democrats.
Before Izaguirre’s sentencing in 2010, Harris reportedly lent her “full encouragement and support” to his deportation. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement records, Izaguirre was deported to Honduras in 2011.
(CHICAGO) — The parents of one of an Israeli-American hostage brought many Democratic National Convention delegates to tears on Wednesday as they recounted 320 days of anguish and pushed for a cease-fire deal to bring their son home.
Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, were greeted with huge cheers and chants of “Bring them home,” as they spoke on stage, fighting back tears. The 23-year-old was at a music festival in south Israel celebrating his birthday on Oct. 7.
“That was 320 days ago. Since then, we live on another planet,” a teary-eyed Goldberg said.
Many in the crowd, who wore “Bring them home” bracelets were in tears as she described her son’s situation and the struggle of not knowing his whereabouts or status. Family photos showing him smiling and happy with his family were displayed as his parents spoke.
Polin told the crowd that the return of the hostages was not a political issue but a “humanitarian issue.”
Polin said that he and his wife have met with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris numerous times at the White House.
“They’re both working tirelessly for a hostage and cease-fire deal that will bring our precious children, mothers, fathers, spouses, grandparents and grandchildren home. And we’ll stop the despair in Gaza,” he said to cheers.
Polin went on to note that there “is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East and a competition of pain.”
“There are no winners,” he said.
Polin stressed that the cease-fire deal is “the one thing that can most immediately release pressure and bring calm to the entire region.”
“The time is now,” he said to cheers.
Before they left the stage, Goldberg sent an emotional message to her son.
“Hersh, if you can hear us, we love you. Stay strong, survive,” she said.
(WASHINGTON) — New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez will resign his office on Aug. 20 following the conviction in his federal corruption trial, according to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.
Murphy, who will select an interim replacement, said Tuesday afternoon he has received Menendez’s resignation letter.
In the resignation letter to Murphy, obtained by ABC News, Menendez said he intends to appeal the verdict but does not want the “Senate to be involved in a lengthy process that will detract from its important work.”
“Furthermore, I cannot preserve my rights upon a successful appeal, because factual matters before the ethics committee are not privileged. This is evidenced by my Committee’s Staff Director and Chief Council being called to testify at my trial,” he stated in the letter.
Menendez said in his letter that the Aug. 20 date will “give time for my staff to transition to other possibilities, transfer constituent files that are pending, allow for an orderly process to choose an interim replacement, and for me to close out my Senate affairs.”
Staff members were informed of the senator’s decision earlier Tuesday, multiple sources told ABC News.
A Manhattan federal jury found the New Jersey Democrat guilty on all charges, including bribery, fraud, acting as a foreign agent and obstruction, on July 16 following a two-month-long trial. Federal prosecutors said he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, gold bars, mortgage payments and more in exchange for the senator’s political clout.
Menendez was not required to resign due to the conviction.
Following the guilty verdict, several political leaders called for Menendez’s immediate resignation, including Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” Schumer said at the time.
Sen. Cory Booker, Menendez’s New Jersey counterpart, and Murphy had also joined in the calls for his immediate resignation. Murphy said at the time that he would call on the U.S. Senate to expel him if the senator refused to resign and make a temporary appointment in the event of a vacancy.
Menendez is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 29 and faces decades in prison.
Following the verdict, he vowed to appeal his conviction. He told reporters he was “deeply disappointed” by the jury’s decision while maintaining his innocence.
“I have never violated my oath,” Menendez said outside the courthouse following the verdict. “I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country. I have never, ever been a foreign agent.”
He added that the jury’s decision would “put at risk every member of the United States Senate in terms of what they think a foreign agent would be.”
Menendez, who served as senator for New Jersey since 2006, became the first sitting member of Congress to be charged with conspiracy by a public official to act as a foreign agent.
He refused to resign following the initial indictment in September 2023 despite calls from a majority of Democrats to do so, though he did step down as the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In June, he filed a petition to get on the U.S. Senate ballot in New Jersey as an independent candidate.