Reminder: Kamala Harris Sent Black Parents to Jail if Their Kids Missed a Few Days of School

Isaac Hoops / shutterstock.com
Isaac Hoops / shutterstock.com

One of the only questions that a reporter has been able to ask Kamala Harris so far this summer was, “How do you feel tonight?” That was asked as Harris walked down the hall to deliver her acceptance speech at the DNC convention in Chicago. Other than that deep and meaningful question, the voters still have no idea who Harris is as a candidate. She’s been invisible as Joe Biden’s vice president. Fortunately, Kamala Harris does have a political track record from the time when she was whoring her way to the top of the political landscape in California, so it’s worth looking into that record.

One of the things that Kamala Harris became most famous for in California—aside from not being Mrs. Willie Brown—happened during her time as the state’s Attorney General. She started having black parents arrested when their kids missed too many days of school.

This wasn’t just any other law that Kamala Harris was enforcing after she became the Attorney General. The California legislature passed the law because Kamala Harris asked them to.

Harris was shocked to learn that many kids skip school in California. She asked the legislature to pass a law allowing local District Attorneys across the state to arrest parents if their kids miss more than 18 school days in a year. Harris, who has never had any children of her own, championed the law. She claimed that it would increase test scores in California’s failing public schools if only they had the power to arrest the parents of students for truancy.

The legislature passed Kamala’s new truancy law and former Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law in 2011. District Attorneys were thrilled because now they could focus on arresting parents of truant schoolchildren instead of worrying about illegal alien child molesters and drug traffickers.

In 2013, the District Attorney in Buena Park, a suburb of Los Angeles, called the media so they could take pictures and videos as he had a single mom arrested under the new law. That woman was Cheree Peoples, a black single mom whose daughter has sickle cell anemia. Shayla Peoples had been missing school because her condition was extremely painful and debilitating.

It’s not as if the school didn’t know where Shayla was. She wasn’t cutting class. Her mom had been arguing with the school about how to best provide services to her daughter, whose painful condition prevented her from attending in-person classes.

A gaggle of photographers showed up on a street curb on the morning of April 18, 2013, as two LAPD officers showed up to arrest Cheree Peoples. The cops handcuffed Cheree while she was wearing her pajamas and flip-flops, and then marched her in front of all the media photographers. To their credit, at least the cops looked a little embarrassed by it.

It’s not as if this truancy law in California is just one thing from a long list of reforms that Kamala Harris championed. This law was the one thing that she accomplished as Attorney General. It’s her legacy.

When it dawned on everyone that the only parents being arrested under the law were black and Native American (the groups with the two highest truancy rates in America), Kamala Harris then turned around and criticized District Attorneys for enforcing her law! Harris, who recently happened to turn black herself, was unaware that her new law would impact black families the most.

As for Cheree Peoples, she fought the charges against her for years. Prosecutors finally dropped the case without explanation in 2019.

This is Kamala Harris’s political legacy. It tells us a lot about how she will rule over us if she somehow becomes the next president.