OXON HILL, Md. — Prominent Kansas Republican Kris Kobach is fronting a new group that aims to harness private money and agreeable landowners to aid President Trump’s effort to build a wall along the Mexican border.
Kobach, 52, is strongly considering a 2020 bid to succeed retiring Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., a move the veteran immigration hawk conceded is more likely now that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman, has declined to run.
Meanwhile, Kobach is promoting the new group, “We Build The Wall,” a nonprofit organization that grew out of a GoFundMe effort to raise money for Trump’s border wall.
“I’m working on actually building the wall on the Southern border with We Build The Wall using private funds on private lands,” Kobach told the Washington Examiner on Thursday while making the rounds at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference being held near Washington (the Washington Examiner is a CPAC media sponsor).
The group was spun off from the We Build The Wall GoFundMe account launched by Brian Kolfage, a triple amputee Air Force veteran. Kobach said that Kolfage decided to channel the millions he raised into a nonprofit entity and build the wall directly, because handing the money over to the government wouldn’t ensure that it was used for its intended purpose.
“He realized that if I just write a giant check to the federal government, there’s nothing forcing them to spend it on the wall,” Kobach explained. The original GoFundMe effort raised more than $20 million, and Kobach said nearly 95 percent of donors have agreed to channel their money into the new group.
Kobach for years has been a key voice inside the Republican Party advocating for stricter limits on legal immigration and more aggressive steps to combat illegal immigration. Those politically charged positions have endeared Kobach to Trump and the GOP base.
But Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, lost his bid for governor in 2018, and some are blaming his loss in his largely red home state on the image he has cultivated as uncompromising immigration hawk. Kobach blamed the loss on Kansas voters’ perceptions that Republicans were opposed to adequate funding for public education, a view he said was untrue.
However, Kobach conceded that Republicans could have a lasting problem in Eastern Kansas, in the suburbs of Kansas City, Mo., where moderate Republicans predominate. Last November, voters there ousted the incumbent Republican in the Third Congressional District, replacing him with a Democrat.
“We had a mini blue wave,” Kobach said, describing what happened in the Kansas City suburbs last fall. “There definitely is something that happened there.”
Kobach said he will decide on the Senate race in the next six months.
