“While we understand that many people are desperate to migrate to the United States, our system must be orderly and secure, and that is my goal,” Harris said as she pledged to do more to prevent illegal border crossings.
But her intentional move toward border politics also stands in particular contrast with Harris’s strategy in the first year as vice president, when she responded to Biden’srequest to focus on addressing the causes of migration from Central America in part by resisting any association with the border.
And it runs the risk of amplifying a vulnerability, rather thanminimizing it.
“The more she leans in, the more she closes the gaps, on both the economy and the border issue — she deserves a lot of credit for that, that’s a gutsy move,” said Ashley Etienne, a Democratic strategist who served as Harris’s communications director in 2021. “It runs counter to what we typically do as Democrats … and it seems to be working.”
But, Etienne added: “It also comes with risk, and that could be that you get caught up in Republicans’ border messaging loop and you can’t get out of it — and you’ve only got 40 days.”
In her first few months in office in 2021, Harris repeatedly distanced herself from the problems at the southern border.
“The vice president is not doing the border,” her then-spokesperson Symone Sanders-Townsend told reporters in March 2021, two days after Biden announced her role with immigration. At the time, illegal border crossings were sharply rising to roughly 170,000 per month, and Republicans began calling on Harris to visit.
She and her team continued to insist her focus was on Latin America while the situation at the border was the domain of the Department of Homeland Security. The resistance culminated in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in June of 2021 from Guatemala, where he pressed her on not yet having visited the border as vice president.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” she said, laughing. “I don’t understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.”
The moment has stuck with her as one of the lower points in her public image. Later that month, amid the heightened criticism, she visited El Paso with the homeland security secretary. Illegal border crossings would continue to rise, to more than 200,000 encounters per month, peaking last year to nearly 250,000 in December. They have since fallen to under 60,000 a month.
Republicans have criticized her decision to make this campaign trip, as Trump has made a hard-line approach to immigration a centerpiece of his campaign. Trump has pledged to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and reprise his draconian approach to immigration from his tenure as president.
“After almost four years, Border Czar Kamala Harris has decided, for political reasons, that it’s time for her to go to our broken Southern Border,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social earlier this week. “What a disgrace that she waited so long, allowing millions of people to enter our Country … only I can fix it!”
A recent CNN poll showed likely voters trusting Trump over Harris 49 percent to 35 percent on the issue of immigration. But that was an improvement of Trump’s lead over Biden from July.
But Democrats and immigration advocates see a different opportunity and set of circumstances today than 2021, and believe Harris can make up ground by leaning into the perceived weakness.
Harris on Friday called for more resources and stricterborder security measures while also calling for a path to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants. She also highlightedher work as attorney general of California, a border state, taking on transnational gangs, as well as her support for a conservative bipartisan border bill negotiated in the Senate that Trump opposed and directed Republicans in the chamber to kill.
“The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future,” Harris said.
Border crossings have also fallen to levels below their point when Trump left office, and Harris pointed to administration policies as the reason for the drop.
“Trump’s transparent decision to kill the border bill because he wanted to deny the Biden-Harris administration a policy win gave them a clear path to go on offense with the issue,” said Tom Jawetz, a former Biden administration homeland security official.
Biden earlier this year signed an executive order to deny migrants who cross the border illegally the ability to pursue asylum claims when migration levels are above a certain threshold,pushing out anyone who crosses practically immediately. The policy has dramatically reduced the number of asylum claims.
Though the policies were opposed by many on the left, they also came as mayors and governors of blue areas voiced their frustration as they struggled with an influx of migrants requiring shelter and assistance.
But Jawetz pointed to the administration’s work to build out legal ways for immigrants to come to the US through parole programs as just as important as the measures restricting asylum. One such effort for immigrants of certain countries has reduced illegal crossings of those nationals by 99 percent,Customs and Border Protection recently said.
And though Harris has faced criticism from the left about her recent embrace of restrictive border measures, some immigration advocates trust she will also work to provide legal paths to the US for immigrants or to citizenship for those who have built a life here for years. In a face-off with Trump, they see Harris as the clear choice.
Douglas Rivlin, spokesperson for the pro-immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice, said Trump’s repetition of the debunked claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, as well as his hard-line policies have created room for Harris at the center of the debate.
“We think Trump is way out of the mainstream … and that creates an opportunity to go to where the American people are,” Rivlin said. “I think increasingly [the Harris campaign is] seeing this as an issue that is not a kryptonite that has to be avoided at all costs, but as actually an opportunity to lean in and connect with voters.”
Tal Kopan can be reached at tal.kopan@globe.com. Follow her @talkopan.
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Publish date : 2024-09-29 04:06:00
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