Harris puts blame on Congress when asked why White House waited for asylum crackdown, on 60 Minutes

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris on a CBS "60 Minutes" interview aired Monday night pointed at Congress and long-standing migration patterns when asked during a  why the the Biden-Harris administration waited until June of this year to limit asylum, which has since significantly decreased the number of border crossings.

"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," host Bill Whitaker said. "If that's the right answer now, why didn't your administration take those steps in 2021?"

Harris responded: "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.

"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."

President Biden first tightened southern border asylum restrictions in June and further restricted them last month, allowing border officials to impose restrictions when the average number of daily crossings exceeds 1,500 per day.

Migrant crossings last month dropped to their lowest levels since 2020.

In the "60 Minutes" interview, Whitaker said to Harris, whose portfolio as vice president includes migration from Latin America, that "there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration," and that "arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump."

He then asked her: "Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?"

Harris responded: "It's a long-standing problem, and solutions are at hand, and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions."

Whitaker followed up, asking, "Was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?"

"I think the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, OK?" Harris said.