Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of “playing political games” on immigration – his signature issue – as the vice-president sought to turn one of her biggest vulnerabilities into a political strength during a visit to the US-Mexico border on Friday.
Speaking in the Arizona border town of Douglas, Harris declared the US both a “sovereign nation” and a “country of immigrants” and said as president, she would strengthen controls at the southern border, while working “to fix our broken system of immigration”.
“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.”
She hammered Trump for derailing a sweeping bipartisan package that would have overhauled the federal immigration system, while providing additional resources to help hire more border patrol agents.
“It should be in effect today, producing results, in real time right now,” Harris said, speaking on a stage framed by American flags and large blue posters that read “border security and stability”. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
After that bill collapsed, the Biden administration announced new rules to temporarily halt asylum processing at the US southern border. Since then, arrests for border crossings between ports of entry have plummeted. In July, arrests dipped below levels not seen since Trump’s final months in office in 2020, though they ticked up slightly in August.
As president, Harris said, she would take “further action to keep the border closed”, including stiffening the punishments for those who cross between ports of entry. She emphasized her support for “humane” and “orderly” policies, reminding Arizonans of the measures Trump took during his first term to curb illegal immigration.
“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages and tried to end protection of Dreamers,” she said in Douglas, a blue dot in the overwhelmingly red Cochise county.
Before her remarks, Harris walked a stretch of barrier constructed during the Obama administration. In the sweltering triple-degree heat, she received a briefing from customs and border protection officials on efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl across the border.
She also stopped by the Raul H Castro port of entry in Douglas, across from Agua Prieta, Mexico, which is slated to be expanded and modernized with grants from the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by Joe Biden.
“They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job,” Harris said afterward.
Speaking to supporters at a manufacturing plant in Walker, Michigan, Trump boasted that Harris was “getting killed on the border” and blamed the Biden administration’s border policies for fueling high levels of migration during the first three years of his presidency.
“It’s a crime what she did,” he said. “There’s no greater act of disloyalty than to extinguish the sovereignty of your own nation.”
In her remarks, Harris said she understood the unique challenges and needs facing border communities like the one in Douglas, having served as the attorney general of neighboring California. She recalled touring trafficking tunnels used by smugglers and touted her work prosecuting international gangs and criminal organizations that smuggle guns, drugs and people across the border.
Republicans would rather discuss her more recent assignment, as vice-president during a period of record migration when she was officially tasked with addressing the root causes of people coming north from Central America. On Friday, Republicans misleadingly accused her of being an absentee “border tsar” whose policies led to the situation at the border.
Voters in Arizona consistently rank immigration – Trump’s signature issue – as a top concern this election cycle, often second only to the economy. A sizeable share of voters trust Trump more on immigration and border security, but Harris’s campaign believes it has made progress softening Democrats’ deficit on an issue seen as one of their biggest electoral vulnerabilities.
The campaign has blanketed the airwaves with ads designed to blunt Trump’s attacks over her immigration record. On Friday, it launched a new ad in Arizona and other battleground states highlighting her pledge to hire thousands more border agents and stop fentanyl trafficking and human smuggling. “We need a leader with a real plan to fix the border,” a voiceover says.
Less than six weeks before election day, polls show a tight race in Arizona, one of seven battleground states that will likely decide the election and the only one that touches the southern border.
A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of swing states found Harris with a small lead in Arizona, while a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday found Trump opening a five-percentage point lead over Harris, marking a significant improvement from August when he trailed the vice-president by the same margin.
Biden won Arizona by just over 10,400 votes in 2020, becoming the first Democrat to win the south-west state since Bill Clinton in 1996.
Kris Mayes, the attorney general, who accompanied Harris throughout her visit on Friday, urged Arizonans not to sit the election out.
“Races in Arizona can be close, take it from me,” Mayes said. In 2022, the Democrat won her race by 280 votes.
