How Kamala Harris Will Fight Trump’s ‘Border Czar’ Attack

Photo: Office of the Attorney General

It didn’t take long for Kamala Harris’ campaign to come up with a plan to counter the Republicans’ most common attack on her: that, as Joe Biden’s “Border Czar,” she’s responsible for the southern border and the flow of migrants. The vice president hasn’t spent much time directly denying Donald Trump’s favorite accusation, which distorts her real role in working to address the roots of migration in Central America. Instead, she’s harkening back to a part of her career that hasn’t always been central to her political appeal: her time as California’s attorney general.

The message is unmistakable in one of the campaign’s new TV ads. “Kamala Harris has spent decades fighting violent crime,” it begins, with footage of Harris in her days as attorney general. “As a prosecutor in a border state, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling guns and drugs across the border.” The ad finally concludes: “Fixing the border is hard. So is Kamala Harris.”

The ad is playing heavily in swing states ahead of next week’s Democratic convention. It’s an indication of where Harris stands in an ongoing tactical debate at the top of her party over how to talk about immigration — and how worried she should be about Trump’s attacks on the issue.

Her preferred course of action has become clearer since Republicans began focusing on a border assault within days of her candidacy. At her first major campaign rally, a raucous affair in Atlanta late last month, Harris quickly pivoted to the issue. “I was the attorney general of a border state. In that job, I walked with law enforcement officers through underground tunnels between the United States and Mexico on that border. I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels, human traffickers who were coming into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” she said to loud applause. Less than two weeks later, Future Forward, the main super PAC backing her candidacy, debuted an ad of its own featuring throwback footage from her time as attorney general. The ad begins: “She was tough enough to take on transnational gangs as a prosecutor.”

Harris’s reminiscences about her prosecutorial record aren’t limited to immigration. She’s also brought up her work on mortgage settlements with big banks and, of course, used her time as California’s top police officer to frame the race more broadly as a contest between a prosecutor and a criminal. Yet it’s immigration reporting that continues to divide her party somewhat.

The biggest point of contention is how concerned we should be about the mainstream GOP claims about Harris’s responsibility for the border. Blueprint, the polling and messaging group funded by megadonor Reid Hoffman, circulated a memo earlier this month concluding that the “border czar” attack — painting Harris as “an absolute disaster for immigration” with “open-border policies” — was the Republicans’ strongest line of attack. Yet those close to Harris’s campaign are considerably more skeptical. They say that in focus groups and polls, their target voters simply don’t believe Harris ran on immigration policy for Biden, and that those who do are already solid GOP voters, so it’s not worth trying to convince.

“We have found no evidence whatsoever that the fake meme ‘Border Czar,’ or whatever it is, is effective with any voter,” said Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Hispanic voters for Harris’ campaign. “It’s just factually inaccurate, they just come up with some kind of label and then they have to explain what that even means. They’ve come up with a false label that the American public is not familiar with.” Other Democrats close to the operation say that in focus groups, Harris is more likely to be associated with abortion and student loan forgiveness than with immigration.

As such, Harris’s camp has concluded that she should try to define the conversation on immigration rather than answer Trump. While Blueprint recommended a rebuttal message that focuses on Harris’s own status as a child of immigrants and her understanding of the need for a better system overall, Harris’s actual argument about her time as attorney general sounds more like their second-favorite option. And since the Democratic campaign has quickly adjusted to the fact that she, not Biden, is its standard-bearer, they’ve found that the most effective approach is to pair her attorney general talk with a reminder of the need for policy change, specifically a long-term path to citizenship. That’s why the campaign ad reminds voters that “as vice president, she supported the toughest border security law in decades, and as president, she’ll hire thousands of additional border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” And that’s why Harris, at her Atlanta rally, promised to revive and sign the bipartisan border security bill that Trump blew up last year. Speaking in Arizona, the only state on the battlefield at the border, she assured 15,000 attendees a few days later: “We know our immigration system is broken, and we know what it takes to fix it: comprehensive reform. That includes strong border security and an earned path to citizenship.”

Even if those close to Harris don’t believe the near-ubiquitous GOP “border czar” attacks are particularly dangerous for her, the subject is still sensitive. Harris entered the vice presidency thinking that immigration policy was one of her strengths, having worked in California — she was attorney general during the 2014 influx of unaccompanied minors — and in the Senate during Trump’s first term. Yet her vice presidential favorability began to decline only after she visited Central America for the first time in 2021 and deflected questions from NBC’s Lester Holt about why she hadn’t visited the border. Inside the White House, she was frustrated when her warning to migrants “don’t come” became a point of contention, given that she had just reiterated the administration’s policy. At one point, she remained silent in a meeting with staff and a frustrated Biden, who demanded updates on the situation at the border. She then told her own aides that she wanted to make clear that her focus was not on the border but on the origins of migration. In the months that followed, some of her closest allies were outraged that this issue — which she had not taken up as a portfolio topic — was seen as central to her work as vice president.

In the days after she became the party’s nominee, however, she and her confidants have heard suggestions from her longtime friends and advisers to tell voters about her work as AG on the border. One of her first trips in that job, in 2011, was to Imperial County, where she rallied state leaders and set up a task force to crack down on transnational gangs, walked through a drug tunnel and posed with Border Enforcement agents while wearing a navy POLICE jacket. Her own focus as AG was on crime crossing the border, not border crossings themselves. But, explained Brian Brokaw, a former adviser who managed her AG campaigns, “she was elected AG by the narrowest of margins and was immediately seen as the most vulnerable to elected officials in the entire state. The greatest vulnerability she had was the opposition she had faced from almost the entire law enforcement community in the state.” So trips like the first one to the border “became a very important part of her mission during the first term,” he said.

Democratic strategists aligned with her campaign say voters have responded positively in the first few weeks to the messaging test that tells them about her record as attorney general. Immigration lawyers in particular are keeping a close eye on her messaging, particularly to make sure she includes language about a path to citizenship in her appeal. But many around Harris can’t help but notice that the atmosphere around her record as a prosecutor has shifted dramatically since she last ran for president, in the 2019 Democratic primary. Then, she said little about her time in the border tunnels and suggested that it shouldn’t be a crime to enter the country without permission. She has since backed away from that stance. “This is not the kind of material that would ever have been used in a 2020 primary,” said one longtime adviser. “It’s a reflection of the political changes over time.”

It’s also a reflection of lessons Democrats have learned over the past year. Many saw Rep. Tom Suozzi’s victory in the Long Island special election earlier this year as a model for how to talk about immigration, shortly after Trump botched the bipartisan border bill. Suozzi focused on supporting that bill and tightening immigration laws generally. For some strategists aligned with Harris’s campaign, the race was further evidence that while Trump may be happy to talk about the border, his positions are hardly broadly popular — they believe his family separation policies cost him the 2018 midterms.

Now, they see Trump’s border talk as mostly for his own base, not for undecided voters. Voters generally rank immigration among the top issues they consider, but few senior Democrats believe the issue is likely to be the definitive one in swing states outside Arizona. In many states, Harris’ target voters “are more focused on what their mayors are doing in their cities than on what’s happening at the border,” said Celinda Lake, a party pollster who works with the campaign.

These voters, she continued, didn’t necessarily know Biden’s position on immigration and don’t know Harris’s. “They only know the Republican position,” so Harris’s job now is “more of a fill-in.” For many Democrats, the hope is that once she establishes her credibility on this issue, she can turn the attention of many voters to other issues. Nowhere has that been more evident than in Arizona. There, two days after Harris spoke this month about the need for comprehensive immigration reform, organizers managed to get a long-awaited referendum on the November ballot on an issue where Democrats see much clearer potential: abortion rights.