Vice President Kamala Harris was in Chicago on Monday to boast about "Bidenomics" and how the administration's policies have benefited Latinos. But she also used her brief time onstage at the UnidosUS conference to excoriate "extremists" whom she said are stripping Americans of their freedoms and immigrants to the U.S. of their humanity.
It's a theme that is going to be repeated many times as President Joe Biden and Harris rev up their re-election campaign messages.
"I am here first and foremost to say thank you, and I am here to say there is more work to do," Harris said at the annual gathering of the nation's largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization.
Under Biden, 13 million jobs have been created, Harris said. Billions has been invested in community banks that have invested in small businesses that have been growing faster in the last two years than in previous years, she said. And, she noted, Latinas are the fastest growing group of small-business owners.
She touted medical achievements for Latinos: The cost of insulin has been capped at $35 under Biden's watch, which specifically affects Latinos since they are more likely than non-Hispanic whites to have diabetes. Medicare can now negotiate for lower drug prices.
"We are in a moment where extremists, so-called leaders, have a blueprint to attack hard-won freedoms and rights and to do it state-by-state as part of their national agenda," Harris said.
She called out an immigration law signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, that has led some people without legal status to flee the state in fear of being targeted.
And Harris chastised Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for flouting a federal deadline to remove buoys he had ordered placed in the Rio Grande to stop people from crossing the river to enter the U.S. Abbott's immigration enforcement operation has been accused of pushing back pregnant women and young children and denying water to people as they stand in record-setting heat.
"Inhumane, outrageous and un-American," Harris said.
Abbott and the Texas Department of Public Safety, whose troopers have been conducting some of the immigration patrols on the border, have denied the allegations.
Harris said the blueprint to attack U.S. freedoms is not confined to immigration. She named the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had constitutionally guaranteed a woman's right to an abortion; attacks on voting freedoms; the targeting of LGBTQ+ people; the Supreme Court's decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions and undo Biden's program to provide student debt relief. All of this is happening as Americans deal with gun violence and endure book bans, she said.
"They now push forward revisionist history. They push propaganda. They suggest that enslaved people benefited from slavery as they insult us in an attempt to gaslight us. We will not have it. We will not have it," she said to cheers.
Harris urged Latino, Black and other voters to join together as a coalition to fight against those changes and policies. She said such unity is an act of patriotism.
"When we as a society come together, work together to fight in common cause for fundamental values, it is our patriotism that fuels us," Harris said. "When we together fight in coalition for the freedom, rights and justice of all people, that is an act of patriotism."
