I visited Kamala Harris’s liberal hometown where homeless people are taking over after ‘robbery & drugs were legalised’
SPORTING his red MAGA cap on the Berkeley University campus, Luke Riveria is met with withering stares and foul-mouthed abuse.
Perched on his bike at the iconic Sproul Plaza, the former English student at the college told me: “People see me in the hat and call me an a**hole.
“There have been a couple of situations where people spit on the floor and give me the look. I just laugh at them.”
For Luke is wearing his Make America Great Again hat — Donald Trump’s totemic emblem — at a college renowned for woke politics in America’s most liberal city.
The offending garment is about as popular as a Millwall strip at a West Ham home game.
A bastion of Sixties radical and leftist protest, Berkeley found itself home to a “Free Palestine” encampment on campus earlier this year.
‘The most decay’
It is also presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’s hometown — though she doesn’t like to admit it.
Perhaps worried that her associations with radical Berkeley might put off MidWest swing voters, she prefers to name-check more working-class Oakland as the place she is from.
Nicknamed the People’s Republic of Berkeley, in the 2020 Presidential election Joe Biden won just under 94 per cent of the vote here compared to Trump’s four per cent.
Naturally, Luke is not much enamoured with the Vice President’s politics, insisting that she “doesn’t love America”.
Proud of his Latino heritage, Luke says that “letting in all these illegal immigrants” will “destroy” the country.
“They’ve been marching right across that border,” the 44-year-old insists. “If you want to come here, come legally.”
Luke’s MAGA sensibilities are far from replicated by the majority in California. Voting in the Golden State is a slam dunk for Harris.
Yet California is still at the centre of the presidential race debate as Trump tries to taint Harris by association.
With his political antenna homing in on what he sees as his rival’s weakness, Trump likes to characterise Harris as a typical “San Francisco liberal”.
Last Saturday, the former President chose Coachella in California to deliver a scornful speech on what he perceives as the failings of this state.
He accused California of having “the highest inflation, the highest taxes, the highest gas prices, the highest cost of living, the most regulations, the most expensive utilities, the most homelessness, the most crime, the most decay and the most illegal aliens.”
Then, with a Trumpian flourish, he added: “Other than that, you’re doing quite well, actually.
“We’re not going to let Kamala Harris do to America what she did to California.”
So will Trump’s strategy of damning Harris as the Californication candidate pay off in the vital swing states in America’s rural and religious heartlands?
Harris herself appears publicly reluctant to embrace Berkeley as the community that helped shape her.
At August’s Democratic National Convention, an introductory video narrated by actor Morgan Freeman called her a “daughter of middle-class Oakland”.
Berkeley’s Democrat mayor Jesse Arreguín said recently: “Berkeley is viewed as the most liberal city in the US, and we’re proud of that.
“But maybe for some people in the red states, that may freak them out.” Though it’s true Harris was born in 1964, at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Oakland, her parents were living in neighbouring Berkeley.
Her father Donald, now 85, a Jamaican-born professor and economist, met her late mother, scientist Shyamala Gopalan — originally from Chennai, India — when both were students at University College, Berkeley, in the 1960s.
The college’s Sproul Plaza — where we met Luke in his red MAGA cap — was the crucible of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus.
After a brief period living in the MidWest, Harris’s parents divorced, with Kamala and sister Maya returning with their mother to live in a modest apartment on Berkeley’s Bancroft Way not far from the university.
In the 1970s, it was a working- class district, but over the decades it has gentrified and house prices have rocketed.
As we visited the two-storey yellow house that Harris grew up in, a neighbour told me homes here now sell for at least £1.2million.
The upmarket area — known as Poets Corner for roads named after the likes of Chaucer and Browning — has lost none of its 1960s campaigning zeal, with window signs proclaiming “No to fossil fuels” and “Free Palestine”.
Thousands of homeless
Mum Abby Ejigu, 43, who lives close to Harris’s childhood home, believes it is fair to describe Berkeley as America’s most liberal city. “I’m thrilled to see a woman of colour running seriously for the presidency of the United States,” Abby said as she walked her dog Artemis.
That’s inspiring to me, to my children, and to a lot of people all over this country.”
Harris moved away from Berkeley aged 12 when her mum took up a research role in Montreal.
After attending college in Washington DC, she returned to California to study law in San Francisco.
A burgeoning career as a prosecutor saw Harris become the first woman and black or Asian person to become district attorney in San Francisco, then California’s attorney general.
In 2017 she was elected senator to represent California — just as the fentanyl epidemic began to rage. In San Francisco, which gave the world the hippy dream of peace and love, thousands of homeless and often mentally ill people openly snort, smoke and inject what one campaigner called “Hard drugs 2.0”.
Many blame the city’s rampant shoplifting and drug abuse on Proposition 47, a law California adopted in 2014 after a public vote.
Today you can’t walk into San Francisco — she destroyed it
Donald Trump
Designed to slash the prison population, it classified a variety of “non-serious, non-violent” crimes as misdemeanours rather than more serious felonies.
It meant the personal use of most drugs, shoplifting, grand theft, receiving stolen property, forgery, fraud and writing a bad cheque were no longer felonies if the goods stolen were worth less than $950.
One San Francisco shopkeeper who has been robbed repeatedly told me: “I blame liberal politics. The rule of law doesn’t apply here.”
Although Harris was attorney general when the law was passed, she did not indicate whether she was for or against the legislation.
It hasn’t stopped Trump blaming her, and telling a rally in August: “Today you can’t walk into San Francisco — she destroyed it.”
Now Californians are to vote on whether to repeal parts of the law.
The legislation would increase jail time for organised shoplifting and force people with multiple drug possession convictions into treatment programmes.
The scourge of drugs and homelessness extends across the bay to Harris’s home town of Berkeley.
A neighbourhood in West Berkeley has tents pitched on its pavements, with other people sleeping in battered vehicles.
Around 840 homeless were reported to be living in the city in May. Discarded furniture and rubbish litter the roadsides, which are used as open-air toilets.
‘Dangerous on my own’
Now, nine local firms have filed a lawsuit against the Democrat-run City of Berkeley to remove the encampment.
The court documents tell how business owners often find needles and human excrement on their properties and see rats crawling through the detritus.
Emily Winston, owner of the Boichik Bagels factory nearby, said: “People are afraid to come here, and I don’t blame them.”
Barry Braden, owner of Fieldwork brewery, told how a woman came into his premises asking for free food, then swung a ten-foot metal pole at customers and workers.
At the homeless camp nearby, I met mum-of-two Misty Kaunert, who has been sleeping in the back of her friend Jerramy’s dilapidated Toyota Corolla.
She told me: “I’m in limbo. I just left a domestic violence situation.
“It would be dangerous on my own here.
We live in the richest country in the world but the wealth is not even close to being evenly distributed
Misty Kaunert
“There’s a lot of people that are unbalanced without taking drugs. When they do take them, you can times it by a thousand.”
The former nurse, 46, added: “If I vote, it will be for Kamala. We live in the richest country in the world but the wealth is not even close to being evenly distributed.”
Back at UC Berkeley, economics student and local Republican Party leader Utkarsh Jain, 21, said: “The homelessness problem in Berkeley is all over the place, people shooting up drugs, people even half-naked, doing whatever.
“No one cares — it’s just business as usual. No government official is doing anything about it.”
UC Berkeley history student Noah Corea, 23, believes Trump’s demonising of Harris’s career in California may cut through.
He said: “The alienating language that Trump uses does have an effect. I have family in the South and the MidWest and they do buy into a lot of the verbiage he espouses.”
Arriving in New York from the UK last week, I had been sure that Harris would take the White House next month.
Now, after travelling across the country and talking to voters, from the Arizona borderlands to Berkeley on the Pacific, I believe it is Trump’s to lose.