Kamala Harris is used to holding criminals accountable

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is a former courtroom prosecutor, district attorney, and California attorney general. Over the course of her legal and political career, she has established herself as tough on crime.

Harris highlighted her experience as a prosecutor while speaking to campaign staff in Delaware on July 22 and at a campaign stop in Milwaukee on July 23, drawing a contrast between herself and former President Donald Trump, who in May was convicted on 34 felony counts relating to the payment of hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said at the Delaware event. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Harris worked as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area throughout the 1990s before joining the district attorney’s office for the city and county of San Francisco in 1998. She was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2004.

During her time as the head prosecutor in San Francisco, she launched Back on Track, an initiative aimed at keeping young nonviolent drug offenders from reoffending. The program was a success, according to a 2009 fact sheet from the U.S. Department of Justice, with less than 10% of participants being charged with another crime within two years of their offense, compared to 53% of all drug offenders in California who returned to prison or jail in the same time span.

Harris served as San Francisco’s district attorney until 2010, when she was elected California’s attorney general. In that position in 2012, she turned down a proposed $2 billion settlement with large banks that had contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis that caused the Great Recession in the late 2000s. She insisted the banks could pay more. Ultimately, California received $25 billion in the foreclosure settlement.

As attorney general, Harris sued Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit university chain, for misrepresenting students’ employment prospects. The 2013 lawsuit led to the chain’s closure. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Education canceled $5.8 billion in loans taken out by 560,000 Corinthian students.

Harris was behind the creation of the Bureau of Children’s Justice in the California Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Enforcement Section in 2015. The bureau’s work includes protecting children’s rights in the foster care and adoption systems and stopping human trafficking of young people.

“As a career prosecutor specializing in sexual and physical crimes against children, Attorney General Harris has gained firsthand awareness of the prevalence of crimes against children and of the great need to protect them as our most vulnerable members of society,” the bureau said in an announcement at the time. “Most importantly, Attorney General Harris’ goal is to ensure that every child is aware of his or her inherent value to society and to the future of California.”