Leigh Tauss is a newswriter for Raw Story based in Raleigh, N.C. Her work has been picked up by the Associated Press and has appeared in The Washington Post and The Daily Beast, among other outlets.
Before joining Raw Story, Tauss worked as an editor for the Bangor Daily News, a senior staff writer at INDY Week and a reporter for the Meriden Record-Journal. Her writing has received numerous awards from the the North Carolina Press Association, the Green Eyeshade Awards, the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia.
Democratic strategist David Axelrod interrupted former Republican Long Island Rep. Lee Zeldin during a panel discussion on CNN Tuesday night, shutting down claims that presidential nominee Kamala Harris was responsible for the immigration crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“She was the border czar,” Zeldin said. “The numbers skyrocketed. She was supervising a policy that…”
“Lee, Lee, Lee,” Alexrod interrupted. “You want to be factual and substantive and I appreciate that. That is a good instinct. She wasn't the border czar.”
Axelrod explained that while Harris was assigned to work with other countries in a diplomatic capacity, she “wasn't in charge of the border.”
Instead, as explained by a Time report, Harris never oversaw enforcement or policy, and instead was tasked with “examining and improving the underlying conditions in the Northern Triangle of Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—which has been racked by decades of poverty, war, chronic violence, and political instability.”
Alexrod pinned failures to secure the southern border on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who helped kill a bipartisan bill earlier this year that would have heightened border security and crack down on illegal crossings.
“That underscores something about Trump that they will have to deal with,” Alexrod said. “This is a guy who thinks about Trump first all the time, even on a matter that he says is of urgent importance to the country.”
Zeldin attempted to pivot back to the border crisis by claiming that Democrats stopped construction of the border wall, but he was quickly shut down again by Democratic advisor Ashley Etienne.
“The border wall, actually, is down itself. It actually fell down,” Etienne said.
