Kamala Harris stepped out of her motorcade and onto a dusty desert road to view a stretch of America’s border wall with Mexico.
Surveying the scene, dressed informally in light brown jacket and sunglasses in the 37c heat, she may well have contemplated the significance of the tall, rust-coloured railings to her hopes of winning the White House on Nov 5.
If the US vice president loses her presidential bid to Donald Trump, voters’ concerns around her ability to address border security and immigration levels will have a great deal to do with it.
In travelling to southern Arizona on Friday, Ms Harris hoped to confront her biggest electoral vulnerability head-on.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris tours the border wall with Border Patrol agents, near Tucson, in Douglas, Arizona on Friday – Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
With Trump painting her as the face of the Biden administration’s unpopular legacy on immigration, this was an attempt to shake off suggestions she has been absent on the issue and take the fight to her Republican opponent.
While she was focused on “commonsense solutions” for immigration reform, she told supporters in the battleground state, Trump was playing “the same old political games”.
In her tour of the border wall, she met with patrol agents in the border town of Douglas and described the “tough job” they were doing. “And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them,” she said, as well as “thanking them” for their “hard work”.
US Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona with Kamala Harris at the Bisbee Douglas International Airport in Douglas, Arizona – Rebecca Noble/AFP
Speaking at a rally on a college campus in the small town later, Ms Harris promised tough new action to tighten the numbers of people entering the country.
The measures involved imposing stricter, and longer-lasting restrictions on asylum claims than her boss, Joe Biden.
“I will take further action to keep the border closed between ports of entry,” she said. “Those who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended, removed and barred from re-entering for five years,”she said, pledging “severe” punishments for repeat offenders.
The proposal is an attempt to claw back ground from Trump, who polls show is handily beating her on the issue with voters with stringent proposals including a mass deportation programme.
Ms Harris painted her Republican rival as an opportunist, responsible for sabotaging bipartisan efforts to pass “the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades” to deny Democrats a victory on the issue in an election year.
“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said, because “he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem”. She promised to “bring back” the legislation and “sign it into law”.
Kamala Harris speaks with media at the Douglas Port of Entry at the US-Mexico border – Rebecca Noble/AFP
The reality, however, is more complicated. Many of the levers to reduce immigration – both legal and illegal – already exist. They simply lack enforcement.
Moreover, the power to enact the sweeping border legislation she promises does not rest in her hands, but in the US Congress, a body so polarised it has been crippled with inaction for years.
The political will of members of Congress to revive and push through border legislation remains hard to predict. The new balance of power on Capitol Hill will be determined by November’s elections.
Immigration – always a difficult topic for Democratic candidates – has been a particular millstone for Ms Harris since Mr Biden made it a part of her portfolio.
She carved out a brief that involved addressing a “root cause” of illegal immigration: the upward travel from central America. It has proved somewhat successful – figures show migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to the US has fallen by 35 per cent in the Biden administration.
It has not stopped Republicans branding Ms Harris a “failed border tsar”, with migration from other countries increasing, and the US reaching a record two million illegal crossings in a year under the Biden administration.
While border apprehensions have since fallen dramatically, Republicans were quick to point out that Ms Harris’s trip to the southern border on Friday is only her second as vice president, and her first in more than three years.
But it signalled her willingness to rebuff Republican attacks, and highlight Trump’s role in the collapse of a bipartisan bill that would have poured billions of dollars into border security.
“He did nothing to fix [the situation],” she told a crowd of several hundred supporters at her rally.
Behind her hung a large American flag and two all-capital signs reading: “BORDER SECURITY AND STABILITY”.
Some of the audience at the Harris rally in Douglas, Arizona – Rebecca Noble/AFP
The location for Ms Harris’s visit was carefully selected. Douglas, a small Democrat-leaning town of around 16,000 in the battleground state of Arizona, is one of the busiest sections of America’s roughly 2,000-mile border with Mexico.
Its port of entry also happens to have received a $400 million cash injection thanks to the Biden administration’s infrastructure package. The stretch of border wall Ms Harris toured was built not under Trump, but the Obama administration.
Amid the tough rhetoric, there were attempts to tread a delicate balance as Ms Harris accused Trump of “fanning the flames of fear and division”.
She went on to reference the so-called “dreamers” – the undocumented immigrants given a pathway to citizenship under Mr Obama.
“I reject the false choice that suggests we must either choose between securing our border or creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly and humane,” she said. “We can and we must do both.”
It was a pitch that may appeal to Hispanic voters, an increasingly influential demographic in Arizona – a state that will be critical to determining the White House – and where Trump still holds a narrow lead.
Donald Trump listens to questions during a Town Hall event at Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan, on Friday – Emily Elconin/Getty Images
From Trump Tower in Manhattan, the Republican former president noted his opponent “keeps talking about how she supposedly wants to fix the border”.
“We would merely ask, why didn’t she do it four years ago? It’s a very simple question,” he added.
The National Border Patrol Council (NPBC), which represents around 18,000 border agents, appeared to agree. “She goes down there for 20 minutes for a photo op and decides to repeat some of the things the NPBC has said before. But again, where has she been the last 3½ years,” it said in a tweet.
As Ms Harris departed in her motorcade, ready to return to Air Force Two, the trail of cars once again conjured a cloud of dust along the desert road.
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Publish date : 2024-09-28 00:41:00
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