Harris visits the border to neutralize the weak spot against Trump

DOUGLAS: Kamala Harris was expected to deliver a tough message on illegal migration on Friday when she visited the US-Mexico border, tackling the politically explosive issue head-on in a bid to become one of Donald Trump’s main lines of attack in their fight for White House.

The US vice president’s trip to Arizona – her first visit to the border since replacing President Joe Biden as Democratic nominee in July – comes as polls show the issue remains one of her biggest vulnerabilities against the Republican.

Harris will call for tighter security in the speech in the border town of Douglas and accuse Trump of assassination attempts to pass a bipartisan immigration bill in the hope of boosting his own election chances, her campaign said.

“The American people deserve a president who is more concerned about border security than playing political games,” she said in her campaign statement.

A campaign official told reporters that Harris will announce that as president she will tighten recently implemented border restrictions that have successfully stemmed the flow of undocumented immigrants.

Arizona is also one of six states expected to decide the painfully close Nov. 5 election, and the one where polls show Harris may have to do the most work.

Former President Trump has boosted the border issue in recent weeks as he sought an edge over Harris, America’s first female, Black and South Asian vice president.

The 78-year-old has called for mass deportations, amplified false claims that migrants eat cats and dogs, and ramped up his racially charged rhetoric about an “invasion” of illegal immigrants he says includes murderers, rapists and mentally ill people. .

Hours before Harris was scheduled to speak in Arizona, figures from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security showed that there are 425,000 noncitizens living in the United States who have been convicted of crimes, including more than 13,000 of those convicted of murder.

Trump jumped on the news and claimed that these people had been “released from prison and are roaming our streets.”

Trump claimed – falsely – that the numbers included people who crossed the border illegally under the Biden-Harris administration.

In fact, the numbers provide no details on how long these people have been in the United States, and experts say many of them could have been in the country for decades.

“These are people who have already been charged and convicted and served their time in the first place,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council told AFP.

Reichlin-Melnick said there were millions of noncitizens living in the United States under Trump, including hundreds of thousands with criminal records.

“The only reason they cannot be deported is because of diplomatic issues with their home country and nothing to do with the policies or practices of the U.S. government,” he said.

Recent polls show Harris has eaten into Trump’s lead on migration among voters, but it still remains a weak spot for Harris, with record numbers of illegal border crossings under her and Biden’s watch.

But Harris points to the fact that numbers have plummeted since Biden signed an executive order in June to temporarily close the border to asylum seekers — to about 58,000 in August, down from a peak of 250,000 last December.

During her visit, the 59-year-old will meet with border agents, call for action to stop the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl across the border, and talk about her former career as a prosecutor involved in tackling gangs smuggling drugs across the border , the campaign said.

Republicans have also focused on Harris’ role early in the Biden administration, when the president tasked her with investigating the causes of illegal migration from Central America — wrongly calling her a “border czar” and suggested she had overall control over U.S. border policy.

Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his divisive anti-migrant rhetoric, with the billionaire seeing it as appealing to his base of largely white, working-class voters.

In his remarks Thursday, Trump also repeated his claim that migrants were “infecting our country,” using language that Biden has previously compared to that of Nazi Germany.

Trump and his running mate JD Vance have been pushing false stories in recent weeks about Haitian migrants eating pets in the city of Springfield, Ohio. -AFP

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