Harris, at the Border, Shows Democrats’ Hard-Line Evolution on Immigration

Harris, at the Border, Shows Democrats’ Hard-Line Evolution on Immigration

Vowing to carry on President Biden’s crackdown on asylum and to impose order on the southern border, the vice president demonstrated how much the politics of immigration have changed.

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By Nicholas NehamasHamed Aleaziz and Reid J. Epstein

Nicholas Nehamas reported from Douglas, Ariz., and Hamed Aleaziz and Reid J. Epstein from Washington.

On her first trip to the southern border as the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered one of her party’s toughest speeches on immigration and border policy in a generation. Even as she did, she tried to paint former President Donald J. Trump as a feckless chaos agent without the ability to deliver the hard-line results he has promised.

Ms. Harris vowed to carry on President Biden’s crackdown on asylum and to impose order on the southern border, demonstrating how much the politics of immigration have shifted for Democrats. Just one presidential cycle ago, Ms. Harris and most other candidates in the party’s primary race had promised to decriminalize illegal border crossings.

Ms. Harris’s remarks on Friday in the border town of Douglas, Ariz., laid out a vision that makes clear that her party — and the nation — continue to back away from the long-held American promise of protection to desperate people fleeing poverty and violence abroad no matter how they enter the United States.

“The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them,” Ms. Harris said. “I take that responsibility very seriously.”

In political terms, her visit to Arizona — a critical battleground state where she narrowly trails Mr. Trump in polls — represented an attempt to toughen her image on immigration, an issue on which surveys show that many voters favor the former president.

On Friday, she spoke at a community college on a stage adorned with signs that read “Border Security and Stability.” Before her speech, she visited U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s port of entry in Douglas, walking along a section of border wall that the Obama administration built in 2012. Border agents also briefed her on efforts to stop fentanyl smuggling.

Ms. Harris had visited the border only once before as vice president, in 2021.

On this trip, she made clear that she would continue to embrace Mr. Biden’s executive order in June to ban asylum for those who cross illegally, regardless of what happens with a bipartisan immigration bill that she has largely focused on in previous speeches. The bill included similar restrictions on asylum, but it has remained stalled in Congress. Mr. Trump persuaded Republicans in the Senate to scuttle the bill this year, a point Ms. Harris often makes on the campaign trail, accusing him of prioritizing politics over good policy.

In Douglas, Ms. Harris hammered Mr. Trump in unusually harsh terms, not just on the border bill but also for what she called his failure to address immigration as president.

“He did not solve the shortage of immigration judges,” she said. “He did not solve the shortage of border agents. He did not create lawful pathways into our nation. He did nothing to address an outdated asylum system.”

And she condemned the policies he did embrace, saying that his family separation policy “ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms” and “put children in cages.”

Still, Ms. Harris also used her visit to emphasize a need for a comprehensive immigration overhaul. Throughout the campaign, she has tried to strike a balance between enforcement and upholding the nation’s history of welcoming immigrants.

“We must reform our immigration system to ensure that it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger,” she said in Douglas as she called for legal pathways for citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including farmworkers and the group of Americans known as Dreamers, who were brought to the country illegally as children.

Ms. Harris’s trip to the border underscored how much the situation has changed there, as a decrease in crossings made her visit politically possible. The number of border arrests peaked in December, when around 250,000 apprehensions were made. Since June, when Mr. Biden issued his order, the administration has seen some of the lowest arrest figures of the last few years. In July, 56,000 arrests were made. In August, it was more than 58,000, and September appears on track for similar figures.

The overall drop in border crossings has been felt in Arizona. In December, in the Tucson region of the border where Douglas sits, agents made more than 80,000 arrests. This summer, the situation has been much different. In July and August combined, agents made more than 23,000 arrests in the area.

Mr. Biden’s asylum order is able to be lifted if the number of arrests dip below 1,500 for a week. On Friday, Ms. Harris’s campaign said she would go further than Mr. Biden by making the restrictions harder to lift. She would require that “the number of average border crossings be lower for longer before the shutdown can be lifted,” a campaign statement said.

For its part, the Biden administration plans next week to try to cement its restrictions into the asylum system by extending the length of time the numbers must remain under 1,500 to several weeks.

Many voters say they believe Mr. Trump would handle the border better as president than Ms. Harris. But the gap between the candidates has been shrinking in some polls, as the vice president has emphasized border enforcement more than overhauling the nation’s immigration system.

Matt Barreto, a pollster for the Harris campaign, said his surveys had found that Ms. Harris’s approach was matching the mood of voters.

“Voters want to hear about solutions on the border — all voters, white voters, Latino voters, Black voters,” Mr. Barreto said. “Voters want to hear, What are elected officials going to actually do to address the broken immigration system? And there was very high support for the bipartisan border security bill.”

But Ms. Harris’s visit was far from a prime-time spectacle. She chose to make her speech in Douglas on what was Friday evening on the East Coast, guaranteeing it would receive more limited coverage from the news media as a hurricane battered southeastern states.

She has stumbled before on immigration. Early in her tenure, even members of her party criticized how she handled a diplomatic portfolio given to her by Mr. Biden to address the root causes of migration. In 2021, she responded defensively when an interviewer asked her why she had not yet visited the southern border, saying that she had not been to Europe either.

Mr. Trump on Friday dismissed Ms. Harris’s trip as a political stunt, saying during a rally in Michigan that she had gone there only because “she’s getting killed on the border.”

Mr. Trump has called for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, a hugely expensive and impractical proposal that would most likely require the construction of vast detention camps and the hiring of thousands of law enforcement officers.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said Ms. Harris’s “last-minute trip to the border and empty calls for more security 39 days before the election will not rewrite the past 44 months of chaos, crime and bloodshed caused by her open-border policy.”

Immigration is one of the top issues for voters in Arizona, a state Mr. Biden narrowly won in 2020. Repeating that feat seems possible for Ms. Harris, but it will be tough.

Her level of support in Arizona is lower than in the other six top battleground states, according to New York Times polling averages. Recent surveys have found Mr. Trump building on his slim advantage there, at a time when Ms. Harris had not held an event in the state since early August.

Instead, her travel schedule and her campaign’s advertising budget have prioritized the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Ms. Harris’s likeliest path to the White House involves winning those states, not Arizona.

While polls show that many voters want action on the border, some doubt that either party is capable of producing it.

Victor Matamoros, 59, of Phoenix, said he wanted to curb immigration but felt let down by both Democrats and Republicans.

“Trump never built the wall like he promised,” Mr. Matamoros said in an interview this week. “And Harris — I don’t feel very safe with her, because she doesn’t have any experience.”

Reporting was contributed by Jazmine Ulloa in Washington, Kellen Browning in Phoenix and Michael Gold in Walker, Mich.