Kamala Harris visits the US-Mexico border

By WILL WEISSERT and JONATHAN J. COOPER

PHOENIX (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will make her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee to tackle head-on one of her biggest vulnerabilities ahead of the November election.

She will appear in Douglas, Arizona, as former President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans ruthlessly criticize Harris over the Biden administration’s record on migration and fault the vice president for failing to act during her stay in the White House has spent little time at the border.

Immigration and border security are top issues in Arizona, the only state bordering Mexico that suffered a record influx of asylum seekers last year. Trump has an edge with voters on migration, and Harris has gone on the offensive to improve her position on the issue and defuse a key political line of attack for Trump.

In nearly every campaign speech she gives, Harris recounts how a sweeping bipartisan package aimed at overhauling the federal immigration system collapsed in Congress earlier this year after Trump urged Republicans to oppose it.

“The American people deserve a president who is more concerned about border security than playing political games,” Harris said, according to an excerpt of her campaign comments.

After immigration legislation stalled, the Biden administration announced rules that would ban migrants from receiving asylum if U.S. officials deem the southern border to be overwhelmed. Since then, the number of arrests for illegal border crossings has fallen.

Harris will also use her trip to remind voters of her work as California’s attorney general in fighting crime along the border. At a rally in Glendale, outside Phoenix, in August, she spoke about helping prosecute drug and human trafficking rings operating transnationally and at the border.

“I prosecuted them case after case, and I won,” Harris said at the time.

Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress at 27 and a leading advocate for Harris among young and Hispanic voters, said Harris is “trying to strike a chord” by supporting stricter enforcement. and “she understands that, right now, there is a crisis at the border. It is a humanitarian crisis.”

“That’s why she’s pushing for more resources at the border so that we have an orderly process, which is very important,” Frost said. “But the point is that Donald Trump stops there, namely only with enforcement.”

The vice president’s visit to Douglas puts the issue of immigration in the biggest spotlight less than six weeks before Election Day.

Trump didn’t wait for her to get there before pushing back.

On Thursday, he delivered a lengthy tirade from New York, declaring that “anything she says tomorrow, you know it’s a hoax, because she was the worst in history at protecting our country. So she’ll try to make herself look a little better. But it is not possible.”

A day earlier, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump told voters that “when Kamala talks about the border, her credibility is less than zero.”

The Trump campaign has also responded with its own TV ads mocking the vice president as a failed “border czar.”

Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, speaks at Trump Tower in New York, Thursday, September 26, 2024. (Seth Wenig/AP)

“Under Harris, more than 10 million are here illegally,” said one spot. However, estimates of how many people have entered the country illegally since the start of the Biden administration in 2021 vary widely.

Harris has also never held the position of border czar. Instead, its mission was to address the “root causes” of migration from three Central American countries – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – that were responsible for a significant share of border crossings.

The vice president took a long-term approach to an immediate problem and helped convince multinationals and Latin American companies to invest in the region. That, she argued, would create jobs and give locals more reasons to stay home rather than make the arduous trek north.

Yet Trump has continued to decry an “invasion” of border crossings.

Polls show most Americans have more confidence in him to handle immigration than in Harris.

Douglas, where Harris will appear, is a predominantly Democratic border town in Republican Party-dominated Cochise County, where Republicans on the Board of Supervisors are facing criminal charges for refusing to certify the 2022 election results. Trump was in the area last month and used a remote stretch of border wall and a stack of steel beams to create a contrast between himself and Harris on border security.

The city of 16,000 has strong ties to its much larger neighbor, Agua Prieta, Mexico, and a busy gateway that is in need of a long-sought upgrade. Many locals are as concerned about making legal border crossings more efficient as they are about combating illegal crossings.

Weissert reported from Washington.

Originally published: September 27, 2024 at 12:35 PM