DOUGLAS, Arizona — In her most forthcoming comments to date on immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed to increase security at the U.S.-Mexico border and prevent illegal border crossings, promising to go further than President Joe Biden’s recent successful actions to stem the flow.
The Democratic presidential nominee charmed the several hundred supporters on-site at Cochise College in southeastern Arizona with a major speech that provided the most significant indication of how she would handle immigration and border policy if elected in November.
“I will do more to secure our border, to reduce illegal border crossings. I will take further action to keep the border closed between ports of entry,” said Harris. “Those who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended and removed and barred from reentry for five years.”
Harris faces a huge challenge overcoming her association with the worst-ever illegal immigration crisis the country has seen during the Biden-Harris administration’s first three years, particularly given immigration’s status as one of the top issues voters care about nationwide.
The Harris plan
Harris’s stance on some of the more recent policies that Biden has implemented, which has led to a massive drop in illegal border crossings this year, has remained a mystery in the month since she accepted her party’s nomination in August.
On Friday evening, she revealed she would keep the border restrictions in place and go further, even making punishments more severe for repeat illegal border crossers.
“If someone does not make an asylum request at a legal point of entry and instead crosses our border unlawfully, they will be barred from receiving asylum,” said Harris.
Harris vowed to go further on Biden’s June asylum restriction rule. The Biden executive order would not only remain in effect unless the weekly average of migrant arrests went below 1,500 per day for three weeks and the average stays under 2,500 — a senior campaign official said ahead of the speech that she will drop it even lower.
The Senate border bill revived
Harris said she would revive a bipartisan Senate border bill that failed to pass Congress last winter after former President Donald Trump directed Republicans not to approve it.
“Even though Donald Trump tried to sabotage the border security bill, it is my pledge to you that as president of the United States, I will bring it back up and proudly sign it into law,” Harris said Friday evening.
But Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) preemptively issued a statement Friday morning that called out Harris should she make such a claim.
“Frankly, she was not a part of it, even though that she said publicly that she and Joe reached out to conservative Republicans to work on this bill, she never actually reached out,” said Lankford, top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management. “She was never a part of the negotiations, nor were any of her staff ever a part of those negotiations around the bill.”
The Senate border bill included funding for better technology at ports of entry to screen for fentanyl in vehicles, as well as hiring more than 1,500 federal police stationed at the border.
James Massa, CEO of NumbersUSA, said boosting staffing levels was not the solution because it would only allow federal police to more quickly process, and potentially release into the country, illegal immigrants — not deter illegal immigration in the first place.
“Harris’ plan will call for more resources for the border, which many believe would be used to facilitate the entry of a minimum of 500,000 illegal immigrants every year, not to secure the border from fentanyl trafficking,” Massa said in a statement.
Fentanyl flooding America
Harris arrived in Tucson early Friday afternoon and flew down to the border in an Osprey. She toured the port of entry, where vehicles are inspected entering the country from Mexico. Harris skipped over the nearby Nogales port of entry, which saw more fentanyl seized in 2023 than any of the 327 ports of entry nationwide.
Fentanyl entering the United States comes from China, then is made into the final product by criminal groups in Mexico, who move it into the U.S. and distribute it, Harris told the crowd.
“Our administration demanded that China crack down on the companies that make those chemicals,” said Harris. “But they need to do more. And as president, I will hold them to their commitment to significantly reduce the flow of precursor chemicals coming from China.”
Anne Fundner, a mother who lost her 15-year-old son, Westin, to fentanyl poisoning and spoke with reporters before the speech, said her son’s death “lies squarely on Kamala Harris’ shoulders.”
“As the border czar … her reckless, do-nothing approach directly resulted in the death of my son and countless other Americans as illicit fentanyl has flooded over our open borders,” Fundner said in a Trump campaign call with reporters ahead of the Harris event in Douglas.
“She is late coming to the table on this. At any point, she could do something. She could reinstate ‘Remain in Mexico.’ She can end catch and release,” said Fundner. “But she doesn’t.”
Harris tours border for first time in more than three years
Before she took the stage at Cochise College, Harris spent several hours on the ground in Douglas meeting with U.S. Customs and Border Protection senior officials, where she learned about fentanyl entering the country through the vehicle lanes at ports of entry and human smuggling that happens between the ports. It was her first visit to the border in more than three years.
Harris was escorted by two Tucson Border Patrol agents along a portion of border wall that was installed between 2011 and 2012 during the Obama administration. The wall was not as tall as the 18- to 30-foot portions approved by Congress during the Trump administration
“They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated. And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them. And also thank them for the hard work they do,” Harris told reporters who traveled with her on the border.
Harris did not disclose the details of her conversations with federal police at the border, but reiterated during her remarks later that employees needed more technology, personnel, and resources.
Why immigration matters as an issue
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump has, for weeks, been losing his edge on immigration to Harris since her nomination and simultaneous shift toward the middle on the issue.
Polling conducted since Harris replaced Biden a month ago revealed that the candidate whom Republicans have decried as an ineffective “border czar” has the backing of a growing share of voters on an issue that Trump has been most vocal on since 2015.
But her plan may be hard for voters to accept given that she presided over the worst illegal immigration crisis in American history, with more than 10 million migrants encountered at the border and another 2 million known “gotaways,” individuals who made it in without getting arrested.
House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) blanched the border visit as a “little more than the arsonist returning to the scene of the fire.”
Harris’s sudden passion for the issue comes despite not visiting Arizona ever as vice president and not stepping foot on the border since June 2021, more than 1,000 days, despite being put in charge by Biden of stopping illegal immigration causes that prompt Central Americans to flee north.
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Harris has fought to change her image as a progressive lawmaker to a more centrist Democrat after a 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire resurfaced, exposing her far-left views on immigrant detention and transgender surgeries despite her recent pivot toward the center after announcing her presidential campaign.
“I will reach across the aisle, and I will embrace common sense approaches and new technologies to get the job done,” said Harris.
