Sen. Kamala Harris got a grumpy response from former White House chief of staff John Kelly when she called him at home about President Trump’s travel ban in the early days of his administration, according to the California Democrat’s new book.
Harris phoned then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in 2017 shortly after Trump signed an executive order that effectively suspended immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa that his administration said posed terrorism risks. The move caused widespread confusion at airports around the country.
“There were a lot of ways Secretary Kelly could have shown responsiveness, a lot of information he could have provided,” Harris writes in The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, the Daily Beast reported Tuesday.
“Indeed the American people had a right to this information, and, given my oversight role on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, I intended to get it,” she writes. “Instead, he said gruffly, ‘Why are you calling me at home with this?’ That was his chief concern. By the time we got off the phone, it was clear that he didn’t understand the depth of what was going on. He said he’d get back to me, but he never did.”
Harris, who has spoken about the call before but in less depth, said the exchange taught her “that calling this secretary of homeland security was a wasted effort.”
“We needed a law,” she writes. “The first bill I introduced in the Senate was the Access to Counsel Act, which prohibits federal officials from denying access to a lawyer for anyone detained trying to reach the United States.”
Political commentators are speculating that Tuesday’s release of The Truths We Hold marks the soft launch of Harris’ 2020 bid for the White House. The former California attorney general and first-term senator from the Golden State, however, has not publicly declared her intention to run, telling reporters last month she would make a decision “over the holiday.”
Harris finished fifth in a December poll conducted by SSRS for CNN asking Democrats who they would like to see challenge Trump during the next election cycle, but she still only amassed single-digit support among respondents. She previously placed third when the same survey was put in the field last October.
[Also read: Kamala Harris: Ending the ‘failed war on drugs’ starts with legalizing marijuana]
