PHOENIX – Vice President Kamala Harris walked a scrubby stretch along the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday and called for further tightening of asylum restrictions as she sought to project a tougher stance on illegal migration and address one of her biggest vulnerabilities in the November election.
Harris' push to further restrict asylum claims moves beyond President Joe Biden’s policy on an issue where her rival, former President Donald Trump, has an edge with voters. She balanced tough talk on policing the border with calls for a better way to welcome immigrants legally.
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“I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane,” Harris said. "We can and we must do both.”
In her first trip to the international boundary since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris chatted with local Border Patrol leaders as they strode along a rust-colored stretch of wall built during Barack Obama's presidency. Temperatures in Douglas, Arizona, neared 100 degrees during a conversation that lasted about half an hour.
Later, Harris received a closed-door briefing at the Douglas port of entry on efforts to combat drug trafficking and improve the legal flow of goods and people across the border. Border Patrol agents have “a tough job" and deserve support to do it, she said.
Harris' visit was designed as a rejoinder to Trump and his fellow Republicans, who have pounded her relentlessly over the Biden administration’s record on migration and fault the vice president for spending little time visiting the border during her time in the White House.
Immigration and border security are top issues in Arizona, the only battleground state that borders Mexico and one that contended with a record influx of asylum seekers last year. Voters favor Trump on migration, and Harris has gone on offense to improve her standing on the issue and defuse a key line of political attack for her opponent.
She used her remarks to challenge Trump's own record on migration during his presidency, saying he did nothing to fix the legal immigration system or address an outdated asylum system. And she said he failed to solve a shortage of immigration judges and border agents.
Harris recounted how a sweeping bipartisan package aiming to overhaul the federal immigration system collapsed in Congress earlier this year after Trump urged top Republicans to oppose it.
“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said, so he could campaign on disorder at the border.
“He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” Harris added. “And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
After the immigration legislation stalled, the Biden administration announced rules that bar migrants from being granted asylum when U.S. officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. Since then, arrests for illegal border crossings have fallen.
Harris' plan to exceed Biden's efforts at the border would include more serious criminal charges for people who repeatedly cross illegally and require asylum claims to be made at ports of entry.
She used her trip to remind voters about her work as attorney general of California in confronting crime along the border. She talked about helping to prosecute drug- and people-smuggling gangs that operated transnationally and at the border.
The vice president’s trip to Douglas thrusts the issue of immigration into the brightest spotlight yet less than six weeks before Election Day.
Trump didn’t wait for her to arrive there before pushing back. He pointed Friday to purported data about criminals entering the U.S. illegally in a bid to link Harris to violent crimes committed by migrants. In a scathing diatribe, he said “blood is on her hands.”
“These are hard, tough, vicious criminals that are free to roam in our country,” Trump said at a manufacturing plant in Michigan.
Earlier in the week, he told voters that “when Kamala speaks about the border, her credibility is less than zero."
The Trump campaign has also countered with TV ads deriding the vice president as a failed “border czar.”
“Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here,” said one spot. However, estimates on how many people have entered the country illegally since the start of the Biden administration in 2021 vary widely.
Harris also never held the position of border czar. Instead, her assignment was to tackle the “root causes” of migration from three Central American nations — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — that were responsible for a significant share of border crossers.
As vice president, Harris has taken a long-term approach to an immediate problem, helping persuade multinational corporations and Latin American businesses to invest in the region. That, she argued, would create jobs and give locals more reasons to stay home rather than take the arduous trek north.
Still, Trump has continued to decry an “invasion” of border crossers.
Douglas, where Harris appeared, is an overwhelmingly Democratic border town in GOP-dominated Cochise County, where the 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, using a remote stretch of border wall and a pile of steel beams to draw a contrast between himself and Harris on border security.
The town of 16,000 people has strong ties to its much larger neighbor, Agua Prieta, Mexico, and a busy port of entry that’s slated for a long-sought upgrade. Many locals are as concerned with making legal border crossings more efficient as they are with combatting illegal ones.
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Cooper reported from Phoenix.