Harris in Arizona visit vows to outdo Biden on border security

Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that she won’t just keep in place President Joe Biden’s sweeping asylum crackdown if she wins the White House. She’ll take it even further.

After spending the afternoon at the southern border in Douglas, Arizona, the vice president proposed toughening the president’s policy that suspends asylum claims in between ports of entry when border crossings reach a certain threshold.

Harris promised to ramp up prosecutions for people who cross the southern border illegally, including felony charges for repeat offenders — a break from her 2019 stance during the Democratic primary, when she supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings. Her proposal would also make it more difficult to lift the asylum restrictions by requiring the number of average border crossings be lower for a longer period of time than the Biden administration’s policy.

“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, speaking at Cochise County College after meeting with border officials.

It’s a striking and aggressive move from Harris in the final stretch of the campaign, as she doubles down on her efforts to cut into former President Donald Trump’s advantage with voters on immigration. The new proposal came during her first trip to the southern border as the Democratic nominee, a campaign stop she used to emphasize her opponent’s role in killing the bipartisan border deal.

“It was the strongest border security bill we’ve seen in decades. It was endorsed by the border patrol union, and it should be in effect today, producing results in real time — right now for our country,” Harris said. “But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill because, you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Biden’s clampdown on asylum has been beneficial for the Harris campaign: Border crossings are now as low as they were during Trump’s last month in office, providing the vice president with a positive datapoint to tout on the trail.

This summer, after the collapse of the bipartisan border deal — which Trump personally lobbied to kill — Biden issued an executive action and accompanying rule that allowed him to suspend asylum claims in between ports of entry when there is an average of 2,500 crossings a day over a seven-day period. Once a shutdown is in effect, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas can lift the restrictions after crossings have fallen below 1,500 crossings for seven consecutive days — a threshold that hasn’t been met since the shutdown began in June.

Next week, the Biden administration is expected to issue a new rule requiring the daily crossings remain at 1,500 for several weeks before they’re lifted, according to a person familiar with the announcement who was granted anonymity to discuss it in advance.

Harris’ proposal to make it even more difficult to lift the restrictions speaks to her advisers’ continued concerns about the issue. Aides cite recent polling showing Trump’s eroding support on the border security since Biden exited the race.

That’s part of the reason Harris wanted to travel to the border to reiterate this message, speaking in a community on the frontlines of the immigration challenge, according to a senior campaign official. She touted her record as attorney general of California, working to prosecute international gangs and trafficking organizations. She’s also vowed to bring back the border bill if she wins the White House and to work with Republicans on the issue.

“It is my pledge to you, understanding how solutions get formed, that I will reach across the aisle, and I will embrace common sense approaches and new technologies to get the job done,” she said.

In Arizona, she visited the Raul H. Castro port of entry, where she received a briefing on the efforts to disrupt the flow of fentanyl through the southern border. Harris also met with border agents and called in her speech for more law enforcement resources and for the Chinese government to crack down on companies that make the chemicals used to produce fentanyl. She was joined by Sen. Mark Kelly and the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes.

Harris said she would surge resources to law enforcement agencies, including more personnel, technology and training. This would include 100 new inspection systems to detect fentanyl hidden in vehicles while ensuring that ports of entry also have updated technology to detect the drug and the chemicals used to produce it. The vice president also said her plan would double the Justice Department’s budget for prosecuting transnational criminal organizations and cartels and imposing harsher sentences on human traffickers.

Harris’ strategy pulls a page directly from Rep. Tom Suozzi’s playbook after he won his February special election in New York by running on strengthening border security. Democrats across the country have adopted an aggressive posture on the issue since the collapse of the border legislation earlier this year, solidifying the party’s notable shift on immigration.

While Democrats have been relieved that Harris has quickly found her footing on the vexing issue, some allies and immigration advocates have been frustrated that the vice president hasn’t talked more about the need for relief for undocumented immigrants who have long lived in the United States, trying to navigate a broken immigration system. And they believe Trump’s rhetoric and his promises to implement mass deportations offers Harris an opportunity to relitigate his controversial family separation policy.

Harris sought to thread the needle in Arizona, speaking about the need to create an orderly and humane immigration system while protecting the country’s “legacy as a nation of immigrants.” She talked about the need for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have long resided in the U.S., including Dreamers and DACA recipients.

“They are American in every way, but still they do not have an earned pathway to citizenship, and this problem has gone unsolved at this point now for decades,” she said. “The same goes for farm workers who ensure that we have food on our tables and who sustain our agricultural industry.”

The visit comes as Trump continues to pummel Harris on immigration, falsely labeling her a “border czar” to exaggerate her work addressing the root causes of migration in the Biden administration. On the day of Harris’ acceptance speech at the Democratic convention last month, Trump also visited the same part of Arizona to blame her for the border crisis. His campaign slammed the vice president ahead of the visit, saying that voters are “smart enough to realize that Kamala Harris has been in charge of the border for four years and she has failed.”

“Kamala’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,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.