What Kamala Harris’ immigration record reveals about her approach

As Vice President Kamala Harris gains ground on former President Donald Trump, Republicans are labeling the Democratic presidential candidate as the Biden administration’s “border czar” and accusing her of promoting an “open border” policy. In response, Harris points to her record as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017.

“I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said at a campaign rally in Atlanta last month. Or, as a campaign video put it, “Kamala Harris prosecuted transnational gang members and got them sentenced to prison. Trump is trying to avoid being sentenced to prison.”

The statements are accurate as far as they go — Harris successfully prosecuted hundreds of cross-border gang members, and Trump is scheduled to be sentenced next month for 34 felony convictions involving concealed hush-money payments — but there is much more to be said about her record on immigration issues, as both California’s top law enforcement officer and a US senator, vice president and presidential nominee.

She is not a “border czar” — that role, if it existed, would belong to the Department of Homeland Security, whose leader, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, was impeached by House Republicans in February for allegedly refusing to enforce immigration laws. And the US-Mexican border is not “open” — illegal crossings reached record highs at times between 2021 and 2023, but totaled 57,000 last month, according to US Customs and Border Protection, compared to more than 75,000 in January 2021, Trump’s last month in office.

Her record suggests that Harris — the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica — is sympathetic to those who flee poverty and gang violence to enter the United States, but hostile to the forces that push them northward, such as the gangs that exploit them or the harsh conditions in their homelands.

Soon after becoming vice president in 2021, she was dispatched by President Joe Biden to Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to try to reduce illegal migration by addressing its causes.

Speaking in Guatemala in June 2021, she advised anyone who was “thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come.”

Migrants and their supporters were dismayed. Harris’ language was “disappointing and shameful,” said Cristina Jimenez, co-founder of the advocacy group United We Dream.

But Harris also worked to promote industrial development in those countries, with US financial support, and encouraged their leaders to work with the Biden administration on programs to protect people from gang violence, cited by many migrants as their reason for fleeing.

“She tried to make it easier for people to stay in Central America. … But that takes a generation,” said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law professor at UCLA. “It’s easy to point to Harris and say she didn’t do anything. No one can do anything in one or two years.”

As California’s attorney general, one of her first trips was to the California-Mexico border, where she visited an underground tunnel used by traffickers to smuggle drugs, guns and immigrants into the US She made prosecution of traffickers a prime issue, periodically announcing arrests of 100 or more gang members.

“In California, law enforcement at all levels of government have made major strides against these criminal groups, even in the face of declining resources,” she declared in a 2014 report, “Gangs Beyond Borders.” Her success in significantly reducing the traffic over the long term is subject to debate, but her efforts did not go unnoticed.

“Disrupting transnational gangs and combating human trafficking were key aspects of Kamala Harris’ approach as California’s attorney general,” Elizabeth Vaquera, an associate professor at Georgetown University and director of its Cisneros Hispanic Leadership Institute, said this week.

“She expanded our office’s efforts at anti-money laundering and narcotics enforcement, especially transnational criminal organizations,” said Maggy Krell, who was a prosecutor in Harris’ office. “I would say it was unmatched anywhere else in the country.”

At the same time, Harris expressed support for immigrants who had entered the US without authorization but posed no apparent danger to the public.

“They live among us. They are raising their children among us. They’re not trying to come here and take America’s jobs,” she told the Chronicle in a 2015 interview. “As a prosecutor, I’ll tell you: An undocumented immigrant, as compared to the general population, is the least likely to commit a crime.”

In a rare division with a fellow Democrat, Harris opposed President Barack Obama’s Secure Communities program, which allowed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to demand notification from local law enforcement officials whenever they arrested an undocumented immigrant. She told county sheriffs in the state to make their own decisions based on their assessment of public safety.

“I disagreed with my president, because the policy was to allow deportation of people who by ICE’s own definition were non-criminals,” Harris said during a 2019 presidential debate. Obama repeated the program in 2014, Trump reinstated it in 2017 and Biden reinstated it again in 2021.

California, meanwhile, moved to protect immigrants in 2017 when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the so-called “sanctuary state” law, which prohibited police from asking about a person’s immigration status and also barred jails from holding inmates for deportation after they had served their sentence.

Harris had left state office by then, after being elected to the Senate in 2016, and does not appear to have taken a public position on the California law. But some of her statements on related issues suggest support, such as a letter in 2015 to US senators considering legislation that would have denied funding to California law enforcement agencies that refused to hold immigrants for deportation.

“When local law enforcement officials are seen as de facto immigration agents, it erodes the trust between our peace officers and the communities we are sworn to serve,” Harris wrote.

The sanctuary law seemed to be “consistent with her approach as a prosecutor,” said Apolonio Morales, a deputy director at the nonprofit California Immigrant Policy Center. “She was very centrist on the issue and would listen to advocates.”

She has also supported legislation that would clear a path to US citizenship for longtime undocumented residents who have lived peacefully since entering the United States.

Nathan Barankin, Harris’ chief deputy attorney general and chief of staff when she was a senator, said Wednesday she is “fully capable of holding two concepts in mind at the same time.”

“One is that this is a nation of immigrants that has flourished … on the inventiveness, engineering and hard work of people who have come to this country from somewhere else. The other is that not everyone who wants to enter this country is a good person.” And Harris, Barankin said, understands “the difference between someone who is a true threat to the health and safety of people lawfully residing in the US and people fleeing violence.”

Reach Bob Egelko: [email protected]; Twitter: @BobEgelko