Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to call for tougher border security measures on Friday during a visit to the southern border, a trip that amounts to her latest attempt to directly confront some of her biggest political vulnerabilities.
In what her campaign is billing as a major speech in Douglas, Ariz., Harris is planning to emphasize her support for a bipartisan border security bill and decry Republican nominee Donald Trump’s central role in derailing it.
“The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,” she plans to say, according to an excerpt released by her campaign.
Her campaign is also releasing an ad that will air in Arizona and other battleground states. “She will secure our border,” the narrator states. “We need a real leader with a real plan to fix the border. And that’s Kamala Harris.”
Harris’s decision to visit the border, as Trump attacks her forcefully on immigration and polls show voters trust him more on the issue, marks a stark effort to address a political vulnerability head-on. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), regularly criticize Democrats as being insufficiently tough on immigration, and President Joe Biden has suffered politically from scenes of chaos at the border, although crossings have fallen in recent months.
During her trip Friday, Harris plans to say forcefully that America needs to enforce its laws on the border, according to a campaign official. She will also recount her record as California attorney general, saying she prosecuted transnational gangs and criminal organizations that smuggled drugs or trafficked humans and guns across the border.
She will also visit Border Patrol agents and argue that they need more resources, and will promise that combating the flow of fentanyl across the board will be “a top priority” of her presidency. As part of that effort, she will propose adding new fentanyl-detection machines at ports of entry at the border and will press the Chinese government to do more to crack down on companies that make chemicals used in fentanyl.
“We do have a broken immigration system. And it needs to be fixed,” the vice president said during an interview Wednesday with MSNBC. She cited the bipartisan border bill, which would have significantly increased the number of border agents.
“Donald Trump got word of the bill, realized it was going to fix a problem he wanted to run on, and told them to kill the bill, don’t put it up for a vote,” Harris said. “He killed a bill that would have actually been a solution, because he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
She said that if she is elected, she would bring that legislation back and attempt to pass it. In a reflection of the sharp shift in the political landscape since Biden took office, Harris focused almost entirely on securing the border, nodding only briefly to the longtime Democratic aim of providing a way for undocumented immigrants already in the country to become citizens.
“We need a comprehensive plan that includes what we need to do to fortify not only our border, but deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to earn citizenship,” she said.
Trump has routinely unleashed harsh rhetoric against the influx of immigrants, suggesting it is poisoning the American way of life. At a campaign rally Monday in Pennsylvania, Trump referred to the immigrant population in Springfield, Ohio, saying, “You have to get them the hell out.”
Trump and Vance have previously — and falsely — claimed that immigrants in the town have been stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets.
Early in the Biden administration, Harris was tasked with leading diplomatic efforts to tackle the “root causes” of immigration by improving conditions in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Although her mandate did not involve current border crossings, Republicans began referring to her as the “border czar” and sought to link her to the problems at the border.
Harris also made a trip to the border in June 2021, traveling to El Paso for a 4½-hour visit to tour operations.