Vice-president accuses rival of ‘fanning the flames of fear and division’ on immigration — a subject he leads her on
Kamala Harris has visited the southern US border for the first time in three years in an attempt to confront her electoral vulnerabilities on immigration.
The US vice-president viewed a port of entry between Mexico and the battleground state of Arizona on Friday afternoon before holding a rally in the border town of Douglas.
The Democratic presidential candidate used her visit to attack Donald Trump on an issue that has been central to his campaign, and a major weakness of her own, accusing her Republican rival of “fanning the flames of fear and division” with his language on immigration.
Ms Harris also called for more punitive measures for people crossing the border illegally.
“I will take further action to keep the border closed between ports of entry. Those who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended and removed and barred from re-entering for five years,” she said.
It marked her first visit to the southern border since June 2021, and only her second as vice-president, despite being tasked by Joe Biden with stemming the flow of migrants from Latin America into the US early in his term.
Ms Harris has struggled with the brief and, while it does not include oversight of the physical border, the Trump campaign has used it to brand her a “failed border tsar”.
On Friday, Trump blamed Ms Harris for the rising trend of irregular migration. “The architect of this destruction is Kamala Harris,” he said, at Trump Tower in Manhattan. “She keeps talking about how she supposedly wants to fix the border. We would merely ask, Why didn’t she do it four years ago? It’s a very simple question.”
Ms Harris’s first border visit in 2021 followed intense political pressure amid an unfolding crisis, with border facilities overrun and asylum seekers being held in squalid conditions.
When Ms Harris was asked why she had not yet visited the border in an interview at the time, she replied: “I haven’t been to Europe either”.
It was seen as a PR disaster and her trip to El Paso, Texas, followed shortly afterwards.
Conditions on the southern border have since improved, with shelters seeing a sharp decline in numbers and official data over the summer recording the number of apprehensions is at the lowest level since Mr Biden entered office.
However, immigration remains an electoral millstone for Ms Harris’ White House run, with polls consistently showing voters trust her far less than Trump on border security and tackling illegal immigration.
In Douglas, Ms Harris spoke to Customs and Border Protection officials and viewed part of a border barrier constructed between 2011 and 2012, during the Obama administration. She also drew on her past work tackling international gangs of drug and people traffickers in California and said she would target the “entire global fentanyl supply chain”.
“As a former attorney general from a border state, she took on international gangs and criminal organisations who traffic drugs, guns, and human beings, and she has long believed we need an immigration system that is secure, fair, orderly and humane, a stark contrast from the divisive and dangerous politics of Donald Trump,” a Harris campaign aide said.
Ms Harris has previously highlighted her support for the tough bipartisan border security legislation that would have granted Mr Biden sweeping powers to shut down the border on days when crossings exceeded a certain threshold, toughen criteria for asylum claims and fund more border agents and deportation flights.
The legislation was blocked from advancing through Congress by Republican senators following a lobbying campaign by Trump who said he did not want to give Mr Biden a “win” on the border in an election year.
Ms Harris frequently highlights her opponent’s intervention to paint him as a political opportunist. “He killed a bill that would have actually been a solution, because he wants to run on a problem, instead of fixing a problem,” she told MSNBC in an interview this week.
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