Kamala Harris’s rebranding as ‘border state attorney general’ is a bait and switch

In one of her first major 2024 campaign ads last month, Vice President Kamala Harris debuted her new brand: “border-state attorney.” The ad, called “Tougher,” features images of the southern border wall dwarfing half a dozen small tents in a makeshift camp. Posing at a lectern in front of what appears to be a large shipment of illegal drugs, a voiceover says she has “spent decades fighting violent crime at the border,” that she has “taken on drug cartels and captured gang members.” As vice president, the ad continues, “she sponsored the toughest border enforcement law in decades.” And as a candidate, she promises to hire thousands more Border Patrol agents and “get tough on fentanyl and human trafficking.” The ad closes with Harris addressing a line of uniformed immigration enforcement officers.

One of the striking features of the Harris campaign, as several of my TNR As colleagues have noted, the Trump campaign’s wholesale adoption of its framing on immigration seems to be taking hold. Harris in particular seems to be capitulating to the way Trump and his campaign have made “crime” the defining characteristic of immigration issues: Left unchecked, Republicans warn, immigration will lead to waves of “migrant crime,” of women and girls being “trafficked,” of communities being wiped out by fentanyl. These claims do nothing to keep women and girls or drug users safe; they scapegoat immigrant communities. Why would Harris accept this narrative? One clue may lie in her “Tougher” ad and similar campaign rhetoric since: If Harris can become a “border state prosecutor,” she can appeal to voters who might see her tough-on-crime record as an asset, while sidestepping criticism of her actual record as a prosecutor.

Trump’s campaign has long used immigration as its not-so-subtle Southern strategy: to associate an already vulnerable outgroup with criminality. More precisely, Trump is attacking “crime,” a free-floating label for any number of (often unspecified) bad things done by bad people, with very little connection to the law or the U.S. criminal justice system. “Crime is through the roof, and you haven’t seen the immigrant crime yet,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin in early September. “It’s started, and it’s vicious, but you haven’t seen the scale of it yet.” In ads, Trump and the Republican National Committee have attempted to cast Harris as Biden’s “border czar,” in charge of “the border,” which isn’t true but has nonetheless structured the Harris campaign’s “border prosecutor” strategy.

Whether or not it was unintentional, the Harris campaign’s border rhetoric has relied on stigmatization against immigrants and those caught in the criminal justice system. In response to a question about immigration during the September presidential debate, Harris praised a border bill she supported, saying that “it would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl into the United States. I know there are so many families watching tonight who have been personally affected by the increase in fentanyl in our country. That bill would have provided more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking guns, drugs and people.” Fentanyl may be an illegal substance crossing the border, but the people transporting it are not recent or unauthorized immigrants. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said that “the vast, vast majority” of fentanyl entering the United States is “smuggled through ports of entry and tractor-trailers and passenger vehicles,” that is, through legal border crossings, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission has said that 86.4 percent of fentanyl trafficking offenses (between September 2022-2023) were committed by U.S. citizens. But the way Harris conflated fatal fentanyl overdoses with “immigration” and “the border” may ultimately reinforce the talking points about immigrants, fentanyl, and “drug cartels” that J.D. Vance is running against.

These offenses seem selected to convey a simple message: Harris focuses only on the worst forms of crime. While some voters may have been critical of her judgment as a prosecutor, as when her office covered up misconduct by a technician at the forensics lab they were using, Harris now emphasizes her record of prosecuting “transnational criminal organizations that traffic in guns, drugs and people,” as she said in her first major interview and as she reiterated during the debate. In the past, she has spoken at sex trafficking events about visiting what she called border tunnels used for human trafficking — while also stressing that as attorney general she learned that the vast majority of people trafficked for sex in California were born there. But she still talks about “the border” and traffickers at the same time. As when she notes that she prosecuted “predators who abused women,” the way Harris talks about trafficking helps to reinforce her image as a defender of women. The crime she is fighting, her campaign signals, is such a righteous crusade that no one should question the way it is being fought.

The fentanyl and sex trafficking talk is based on clichés that Republicans have exploited, like Vance spreading disinformation about immigrants and fentanyl overdose deaths, or Trump linking immigrants to sex trafficking in the most grotesque terms. “Can you imagine having a small community and all of a sudden you have 20,000 illegal immigrants in your community? Nobody knows where they came from,” Trump said at a rally in September. “I’m angry that young American girls are being raped, sodomized, murdered by barbaric criminal aliens.” Nearly a decade of right-wing conspiracy theories about sex trafficking color the way people hear Harris tout her record on human trafficking and the border. Some of those conspiracy theories even blame Harris for sex trafficking.

Harris, the “border state attorney,” is a response to this rhetoric. If she criticizes Trump at the border, it’s for not being tough enough. But that also jeopardizes her ability to speak forcefully about Trump’s hateful anti-immigrant propaganda. In the September debate, Harris warned viewers that Trump would resort to “a lot of lies, a lot of grievances, a lot of name-calling.” But when Trump then used the debate to spew anti-immigrant propaganda about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs, Harris failed to rebut or condemn the lie. Nor did she acknowledge these immigrant communities and the problems they face at any other point in the debate.

Asked directly about Springfield a few days later by interviewers convened by the National Associate of Black Journalists, Harris said Trump was “spreading lies that are based on centuries-old tropes.” She connected them to Trump’s own history. “This is not new in terms of where it comes from and whether it’s refusing to rent to people, to rent to black families, whether it’s taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times against five innocent black and Latino teenagers, The Central Park Five, calling for their execution, or whether it’s referring to the first black president of the United States as a lie.” But most of all, she spoke about the impact of Trump’s lies, not on the Haitian immigrant community, but on children more broadly, on “an entire community that is afraid,” and on the police. “Look, you say you care about law enforcement,” Harris said, “law enforcement resources that are being put into this because of these serious threats that are being made against a community that was living productive, good lives before this happened.” She didn’t use the words “Haiti,” “Haitian,” or “immigrant” when she spoke about those harmed by these lies. But she did speak about law enforcement.