Kamala Harris visits the US border for the first time in three years – DNyuz

Rozina Sabur

Deputy US Editor,

in Douglas, Ariz

September 27, 2024 7:42 PM

Kamala Harris will visit the southern U.S. border for the first time in three years in an effort to address her electoral vulnerabilities on immigration.

The US vice president will tour a port of entry between Mexico and the battleground state of Arizona later on Friday afternoon before holding a meeting in the border town of Douglas.

Campaign officials said the Democratic presidential candidate will use the visit to attack Donald Trump on an issue that has been central to the Republican campaign and is itself a major weakness.

She is expected to highlight the former president’s role in the tank legislation proposed by a cross-party group of senators and hailed as the toughest bipartisan border security plan in a generation.

It marks her first visit to the southern border since June 2021, and only her second as vice president, despite Joe Biden’s order to stem the flow of migrants from Latin America into the US early in his term.

Ms. Harris has struggled with this assignment, and while it does not include policing the physical border, the Trump campaign has used it to brand her a “failed border czar.”

Her first border visit in 2021 followed intense political pressure amid a developing crisis that has seen border facilities overrun and asylum seekers held in squalid conditions.

When Ms Harris was asked in an interview at the time why she had not yet visited the border, she replied: “I have not been to Europe (also)”.

It was seen as a PR disaster and her trip to El Paso, Texas, followed soon after.

Conditions at the southern border have since improved, with the number of shelters sharply reduced and apprehensions at their lowest level since Mr. Biden took office, according to official summer data.

Immigration, however, remains an electoral millstone for Harris’ White House campaign, with polls showing voters trust her far less than Trump when it comes to border security and tackling illegal immigration.

Ms Harris is expected to highlight her work in this area in her speech in Douglas on Friday afternoon, drawing on her previous work tackling international drug and human trafficking gangs in California.

“As a former attorney general from a border state, she took on international gangs and criminal organizations that traffic drugs, weapons and people, and she has long believed that we need an immigration system that is safe, fair, orderly and humane, a stark contrast with the divisive and dangerous policies of Donald Trump,” a Harris campaign official said.

Ms. Harris will also emphasize her support for tough, bipartisan border security legislation that would have given Mr. Biden sweeping powers to close the border on days when crossings exceeded a certain threshold, tighten criteria for asylum claims and increase the number of border agents and deportation flights finance.

Republican senators blocked the legislation from moving through Congress after a lobbying campaign by Mr Trump, who said he did not want to give Mr Biden a “victory” at the border in an election year.

Ms Harris regularly highlights her opponent’s intervention to portray him as a political opportunist. “He has pushed aside a bill that would actually have been a solution because he wants to address a problem, instead of solving a problem,” she told MSNBC in an interview this week.

While Trump has pledged to carry out mass deportations and other measures to remove both illegal and legal migrants from the country, Ms. Harris has attempted a more delicate juggling act.

She has backed tough measures to secure the border against illegal immigration, while also backing a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

Ms. Harris has gained some ground among Hispanic voters, a key voting bloc in Arizona, but Trump still holds a narrow lead in the state. It will be critical to winning the White House on November 5.

The report that Kamala Harris is visiting the US border for the first time in three years first appeared in The Telegraph.