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Harris expressed concern for the safety of LGBTQ+ Americans, immigrants, and others at a meeting of Black journalists.
Vice President Kamala Harris expressed concern for the safety of LGBTQ+ Americans, immigrants, and others during a National Association of Black Journalists event Tuesday in Philadelphia.
Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said she feels safe with Secret Service protection after the Sunday attempted attack on her Republican rival, Donald Trump. “But you can go back to Ohio, not everybody has Secret Service,” she said, referring to the threats against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, after Trump and others spread lies about them stealing and eating pets.
“And there are far too many people in our country who are not feeling safe,” she continued. “I mean, I look at Project 2025, and, you know, the ‘don’t say gay’ laws coming out of Florida, and members of the LGBTQ+ community don’t feel safe right now. Immigrants or people with an immigrant background don’t feel safe right now. Women don’t feel safe right now. Yes, I feel safe, I have Secret Service protection, but that doesn’t change my perspective on the importance of fighting for the safety of everybody in our country and doing everything we can to, again, lift people up and not beat people down so they feel alone and made to feel small and not a part of it or us.”
Harris also said she had spoken to Trump after the apparent assassination attempt at his golf course in Florida Sunday. “I checked on him to see if he was OK,” she said. “And I told him what I had said publicly, that there’s no place for political violence in our country.”
Her response was markedly different from Trump’s. In a Monday interview with Fox News Digital, he blamed the attack on Harris and President Joe Biden. “He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump said of the suspect. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
Harris’s appearance with the Black journalists group was likewise markedly different from Trump’s discussion with the association in July in Chicago, in which he questioned Harris’s racial identity.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black,” he said. “And now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black.”
Harris is of Black and South Asian heritage, and she has never hidden any aspect of her identity.
