Kamala Harris prosecuted the parents of truant children as District Attorney of San Francisco and California Attorney General in a dubious effort to improve attendance that disproportionately hurt people of color in her state.
Harris tried to walk back her support for prosecuting truancy when she last ran for president in 2019. She even falsely claimed that no one had been jailed as a result of her policy, when in fact parents had been prosecuted and jailed.
As former Breitbart News White House correspondent Charlie Spiering wrote in his book on Harris, Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House, Harris was lenient toward cop killers, murderers, and gun offenders, and botched a thousand drug cases tainted by faulty evidence, but she was tough on parents of truant children. She even “made a public show of using her authority to strike fear into the hearts of public-school-attending families,” Spiering recalled.
The issue came up in 2019, when National Public Radio noted that Harris’s program hurt black and Latino parents:
In 2019, HuffPost reporter Molly Redden wrote about the families affected by this truancy program, including a Black mother named Cheree Peoples, who was arrested in April of 2013. She came on the show to help explain why this program, which initially launched without much criticism, ended up becoming so controversial, and why it disproportionately affected families of color.
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[Peoples] was in her house one morning, and the police showed up and handcuffed her. She had time to put on a jacket over her pajamas. And when she was walked by the police out of her apartment where she lived with her daughter, there were news cameras waiting, and she was booked by the police. What she said to me was that she was shocked. She was really floored. And she said to me, “You’d swear I’d killed somebody.” It felt to her like a really excessive show of force for what was essentially a misunderstanding between her and her child’s school.
Harris later said she regretted the policy, and claimed that the arrests happened in jurisdictions outside her control.
But FactCheck.org — no friend of Republicans — noted, Harris backed a state bill in 2010 that became law and which explicitly provided for jail time for truant parents. Despite her denials, she was aware that some parents were jailed.
FactCheck.org noted:
After taking the oath of office as the California attorney general in January 2011, Harris said in her inaugural address that she was “putting parents on notice” that they could face “the full force and consequences of the law” if their kids miss too many days of school.
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Harris said she has “now heard stories” about parents being jailed, but as we said her first statewide report on truancy contained an example of a parent being jailed under the state law.
Harris’s prosecutorial overreach did not end there. As California Attorney General, she prosecuted a pro-life filmmaker at the urging of Planned Parenthood, and she tried to force conservative groups to reveal their donors — an effort that was shut down by the Supreme Court.
She also tried to keep thousands of nonviolent prisoners locked up in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling. Harris even argued that the California prison system would lose a reliable source of cheap labor if the prisoners were released.
But when the Black Lives Matter protests arose, Harris joined the mob, protesting at the White House hours after a violent riot, and calling federal law enforcement a “paramilitary.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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