Kamala Harris Vowed to Close Most Immigration Detention Centers: ‘We’ll Shut Them Down’

Vice President Kamala Harris once promised to close most of the nation’s immigration detention centers, saying she would “shut them down” as president. Such a plan would see about 90 percent of all illegal aliens held in detention released.

In 2019, while running in the Democrat presidential primary, Harris told a crowd in Iowa City, Iowa, that she would close immigration detention facilities operated by private contractors who work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“When you become president, would you be committing to close the immigration detention centers?” a voter asked Harris, to which she responded:

Absolutely, on day one — on day one … in Homestead, Florida, there is a detention facility — a for-profit detention facility, a private detention facility — that you are paying for … It’s paid for with United States taxpayer dollars that at the time, and I think today, is housing 2,700 children. And when I got there … we tried to get in. They wouldn’t let us in … I walked down the road and climbed a ladder to see what was going on inside, and what I saw, what I saw were children lined up, single-file, based on gender, being walked into barracks. [Emphasis added]

And let’s be clear about these private detention facilities. This means that their business model is that people are profiting off of the incarceration of other human beings, who, in this case, are children. On day one, we’ll shut them down. [Emphasis added]

The left-wing American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has estimated that about nine in ten illegal aliens held in DHS custody are housed in privately owned detention facilities. That statistic indicates that Harris’s plan would see about 90 percent of illegal aliens currently held in DHS custody released.

Harris also said she would focus on “shutting down those private detention facilities” as president and try to pass “a pathway to citizenship,” which is a euphemism for amnesty for illegal aliens.

Iowa native Lora Ries, who serves as the director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, told Breitbart News that “immigration detention is a necessary means to protect public safety, prevent flight, and to ensure removal if so ordered by an immigration judge.”

“The new, self-proclaimed ‘tough-on-border-and-crime-former-California-Attorney-General’ Kamala Harris knows that, but that Kamala Harris needs to tell the current-Vice-President Kamala Harris and the 2019 Kamala Harris in this video to get on message,” Ries said. “Cue the left’s censorship of this inconvenient video.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.