Beyoncé delivers a speech backing Harris, emphasizing abortion rights
- Harris’ foray into Texas is less about flipping that state blue than issuing a national warning on reproductive rights.
- Trump, who has repeatedly shifted his position on abortion, has denied that he would push for a federal abortion ban.
Deadlocked in the polls less than two weeks before election day, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump headed to staunchly Republican Texas on Friday in a bid to sway undecided voters by focusing on the key issues of abortion and border security.
Texas is not a pivotal 2024 battleground. Polling averages compiled by FiveThirtyEight.com show Trump with a 6.8-percentage-point lead in the state over Harris. But the Democrat’s foray into Texas was less about flipping that state blue than issuing a national warning on reproductive rights from a part of the country that her campaign dubs the epicenter of GOP abortion bans.
After being introduced by pop megastar Beyoncé and fellow Destiny’s Child star Kelly Rowland — who are Texans — Harris came out to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” and delivered a speech in which she told stories of young women suffering and dying after being denied abortions.
She blamed the suffering of those women on Trump and the three conservative justices he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which undid long-standing federal abortion protections under Roe vs. Wade in 2022. And she said there are many other women out there who have suffered similarly.
“There are so many stories we’ve never heard, an untold number of women and the people who love them who are silently suffering, women who are being made to feel as though they did something wrong, as though they are criminals, as though they are alone,” Harris said. “And to those women, I say — and I think I speak on behalf of all of us — we see you, and we are here with you.”
Harris blasted Trump for bragging about toppling Roe, and called him the “architect” of a resulting “health crisis” playing out across the country. She said he erased “half a century of hard-fought progress for women” during his last term, and now wants to go further with a national abortion ban.
Harris noted that Texas officials are suing for the right to demand the private healthcare records of women who leave the state for abortion care in other states, and said, “Simply put, they are out of their minds.”
Before Harris spoke, Beyoncé and Rowland — and Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles — roused the large crowd into raucous cheers.
Beyoncé said it was time for America to “sing a new song,” for young girls to live in a world where they see no ceiling, and for Harris to be elected to a historic presidency.
“We are at the precipice of an incredible shift, the brink of history,” she said. “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother — a mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies.”
Trump, who has repeatedly shifted his position on abortion, has recently denied that he would push for a federal abortion ban. At the beginning of this month, the former president wrote on Truth Social that he did not support such a ban “and would, in fact, veto it” because he believes it is up to the states to decide. He added that he supports exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the woman.
Here is where Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump stand on a federal ban, the Supreme Court and other issues related to abortion.
But Trump was not scheduled to talk about abortion when he spoke from a private airplane hangar in Austin. Instead, he delivered remarks on border security and crime in a state that he said had “turned into ground zero for the largest border invasion in the history of the world.”
“Over the past four years, this state has become Kamala’s staging ground to import her army of migrant gangs and illegal alien criminals into every state in America — and every state’s a border state, you’ve heard that, it’s true — paving a trail of bloodshed, suffering and death all across our land,” Trump said. “And it’s only getting worse.”
The former president made the false claim that “many” of the millions of migrants who illegally entered the U.S. over the last 3½ years “are murderers, drug dealers, people from jails.” In fact, research shows people living in the U.S. illegally are arrested at significantly lower rates for violent, drug and property crimes than native-born Americans.
“We’re like a dumping ground,” Trump said. “What Kamala Harris has done on our border is cruel, it’s vile, and it’s absolutely heartless”
Trump highlighted crimes committed by migrants living illegally in Texas, including two Venezuelan men charged with sexually assaulting and strangling to death of Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl in Houston. He invited Alexis Nungaray, Jocelyn’s mother, to speak about her daughter, who was a rising seventh-grader.
“The Biden-Harris policies we have here are why she’s not here anymore,” Nungaray said. “They made her a target and ran with that, and now I will forever be a grieving mother, and my son will forever be a grieving brother who will no longer get to grow up with his sister.”
Nungaray said Harris had never reached out to her to give her condolences, but days before the election had attempted to apologize. “I think it’s very sad,” she said, “that she can’t even just give me an open ... sincere apology.”
If elected, Trump has said he would deport millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally and carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.” But his campaign has offered few details.
Speaking to reporters in Houston, Harris criticized Trump for comments he made Thursday and again Friday, dubbing the U.S. a “garbage can for the world” because of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies.
“This is someone who is a former president of the United States who has a bully pulpit, and this is how he uses it — to tell the rest of the world that somehow the United States of America is trash,” Harris said.
“The president of the United States should be someone who elevates discourse and talks about the best of who we are,” Harris added.
Former President Trump says that if reelected, he will initiate the largest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in history. Experts say that’s unlikely.
In the final weeks of the campaign, polls show Trump and Harris neck and neck. A national poll released Friday by the New York Times and Siena College found Harris and Trump deadlocked at 48% to 48%. Polling averages by FiveThirtyEight.com show Harris leading Trump nationally by 1.5 percentage points, well within the margin of error.
The Harris campaign is highlighting Trump’s appointment of three Supreme Court justices who helped deliver the 2022 decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade and warning of the dangers posed by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s detailed blueprint for the next Republican president. Many of its contributors are Trump allies and former aides.
Those issues, the Harris campaign argues, have proved effective in winning over white non-college-educated women whom Trump counted as part of his base and male voters concerned by the harm abortion bans could pose to their loved ones.
Texas has been at the forefront of abortion restrictions ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe and the state blocked doctors from performing abortions as soon as cardiac activity is detected — as early as six weeks or before. Since then, Texas women who experience miscarriages or complications have faced challenges receiving medical care.
Harris’ rally was crowded for hours before she or Beyoncé appeared, with various speakers taking the stage to talk about reproductive healthcare. Screens and signs around the stage carried the messages “Freedom,” “Trust Women” and “Vote for Reproductive Freedom.”
Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, who is challenging Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, praised Harris for “shining a light” on the dangers facing Texas women and told the crowd he would help restore abortion protections nationally if they helped him beat Cruz. Multiple Texas women and families spoke about the dangers they have faced because of Texas’ abortion restrictions since the fall of Roe, which they blamed on Trump and his Supreme Court appointees.
Shanette Williams, the mother of Amber Nicole Thurman, a Georgia woman who died after doctors refused her a routine medical procedure after she took abortion pills and developed an infection, directly blamed Trump.
“My daughter is gone because of what Donald Trump did,” she said.
Amanda Zurawski, an Austin woman who recently survived a life-threatening pregnancy, joined her husband, Josh, on stage, where both denounced Trump and his allies, whom they said endangered women like her across the country.
Zurawski said she was excited about her pregnancy until she experienced complications at 18 weeks, went into premature labor and was told “with 100% certainty” she was “going to lose our baby girl.” She was also told she needed an abortion, she said, but couldn’t get one under Texas law.
“I was told to wait to seek care until I got so sick that my life was considered in danger,” she said. “Only then would my case fall under one of the rare exceptions where a doctor can intervene in our state of Texas.”
Zurawski said that she nearly died as a result, and that Trump and other Republicans who support such laws must be defeated at the polls — for the safety of women.
A group of reproductive healthcare doctors in white coats also took the stage. Dr. Todd Ivey, a longtime OB-GYN in Houston, told the crowd that recent Texas laws have left medical providers in daily fear for their patients and for themselves, forcing them to deny women care or face criminal prosecution.
“Today in Texas, because of Donald Trump, I could be thrown in prison for life for providing reproductive healthcare,” Ivey said. “And as a result, many of my patients with tragic pregnancy complications have been forced to flee our state to get the healthcare that they need and that they deserve.”
Nearly 30 million Americans have voted early. Despite mixed signals from Donald Trump, the GOP is showing gains with early voting in Orange County.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Trump has repeatedly shifted his message on abortion.
The former president has called himself the “most pro-life president ever” and boasted about appointing three justices who voted to overturn Roe. But he has also blamed the “abortion issue” for the GOP’s poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections, slammed Florida’s six-week abortion ban as “a terrible mistake” and pledged to work with Democrats to pass a national bipartisan law on abortion.
If Harris becomes president, she seeks to pass a law that would codify Roe vs. Wade into law.
Earlier this week, the Democratic presidential nominee said that if she were elected and Congress were controlled by the GOP she would be unwilling to compromise on abortion legislation, such as offering religious exemptions, to gain the support of moderate Republican senators, such as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.
“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said Tuesday in an interview with NBC News.
“I’m not gonna engage in hypotheticals because we could go on a variety of scenarios,” Harris added. “Let’s just start with a fundamental fact, a basic freedom has been taken from the women of America: the freedom to make decisions about their own body. And that cannot be negotiable, which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe vs. Wade. And that is it.”
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