Bartholomew Sullivan

WASHINGTON – An energetic Senator-elect Kamala Harris said Thursday that her experience with previous efforts to deport undocumented criminals, as President-elect Donald Trump has proposed, makes her “suspicious of that approach” in part because what’s defined as criminal is so broad.

Harris, a career prosecutor still serving as California’s Attorney General, said she had to part from President Barack Obama on the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Secure Communities initiative that sought to identify undocumented criminals with serious criminal records. Her office monitored the program and found that, “by ICE’s own records,” people were being detained who were not criminals by the agency’s own definition. The program ended in 2014.

“What I’ve seen is that ‘criminal’ is a very broad term. There’s a whole range of behaviors that can qualify as being a crime…DUI is very different from rape,” she said.

Harris, 52, is in Washington this week for her freshman orientation and met with three reporters from California newspapers in a tiny windowless basement conference room in the Dirksen Building. Laughing and joking about her days as a Washington intern while a student at Howard University, she said she’d been a tour guide at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and cut out clippings from newspapers as a press aide at the Federal Trade Commission.

She also got a summer internship with California Senator Alan Cranston as a mailroom clerk in the same ground floor Hart Building office he turned over to Harris’ predecessor, Barbara Boxer, and that Harris hinted she hopes to get. Still, she confessed, she has gotten lost in the Capitol’s labyrinths and had to ask “some bright-eyed, 20-year-old interns” to find her way.

So far, she hasn’t received any decisions from the Senate Democratic leadership about committee assignments but said she would be interested in helping shore up California’s $59 billion unmet transportation needs, and work on the Judiciary and Veterans Affairs panels.

Noting people often can’t afford to live where they work, she joked “people will tell you it’s a human rights issue” to have to drive the 405 in L.A. She said she would be “very happy to work with President-elect Trump on infrastructure.”

Regardless of committee assignments, she said, “you can find ways to collaborate and do work on just about any subject matter.”

She said her attorney general’s office is already undertaking an analysis of the best state responses to some of the policies Trump has proposed and noted “we have a history in California of standing up in the face of federal opposition” on issues from marijuana to same-sex marriage.

Her plan in response to efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, another Trump proposal, is “to fight it.” She said Cover California has added 1.7 million residents who had been uninsured.

Describing her first visit to the Senate chamber as a senator-elect, she said she was “awestruck.”

“When you remember and think of the history of what happens in that chamber,” she said, pausing. She said she admired the worn marble of the stairs in the U.S. Capitol sunken “because that many feet walked on that marble over so many years.”

She said she’s staying on in Washington after the orientation to look for housing with her husband, Los Angeles attorney Douglas.

“D.C. has changed so much since I last lived here,” she said.

Harris will be the first African American and Indian American to represent the Golden State in the Senate. She defeated 10-term Orange County Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez -- 62.5 percent to 37.5 percent -- in the first-ever race between two Democrats in a statewide general election.