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Kamala Harris heads to Arizona to counter border criticism

Gillberg
Kamala Harris heads to Arizona to counter border criticism

Vice President Kamala Harris will visit a city at the center of the nation’s immigration woes on Friday to lay out her vision for border security and counter attacks by former President Donald Trump.

Harris has just six weeks left to convince voters she would do a better job on immigration than her Republican opponent, an issue Arizonans cite as a top factor as they consider who to vote for on Nov. 5.

And right now, polls show more voters say they trust Trump to handle the issue more effectively than Harris.

“The purpose of her trip is to try to define or redefine the immigration narrative,” said Morgan Bailey, a lawyer who was previously deputy chief of staff at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security. “She walks this very fine political tightrope of border security versus humanitarian challenges.”

Arizona is home to the nation’s busiest border corridor and has the most heavily fortified stretch of border in the country.

Trump and Harris are locked in a contentious race in the state, where the latest polls show a tight race with Trump gaining ground. Both campaigns see Arizona, with its 11 electoral votes, as a must-win battleground state.

Harris became the Democratic nominee last month, and in that time Trump has worked to define his position on immigration on his terms. Trump made a recent trip to the Arizona-Mexico border to paint Harris as a “radical leftist” and link her to violent accounts of migrant crime.

Now, Harris will use that same Arizona county as a backdrop to define her own views on immigration policy.

“Trump will continue to try to paint an image of her as soft on allowing people to come to the United States without a legal basis,” Bailey said. “So it’s a benefit for her to go out and talk about these issues and make it clear what her policies and priorities are.”

Trump criticized Harris for her trip to the border in a post on X, saying “she has destroyed the very fabric of our nation” as border crossings have increased during the Biden administration.

During her visit to Douglas, a border town of 15,500 in Cochise County, Harris plans to attack Trump for his role in sinking a bipartisan border bill that stalled in Congress earlier this year. Trump urged Republicans to block the bill to deny President Joe Biden an election-year victory.

“This bipartisan bill that she refers to a lot has been derailed by her opponent. I think it highlights that Donald Trump and his allies like to deal with problems, they don’t like to run after solutions,” said César Fierros, director of communications for the Arizona-based advocacy group Living United for Change. “That’s something she’s going to point out, and I think that’s going to turn voters off even more once they become more educated about what Trump is actually trying to do when it comes to immigration.”

Anticipating his trip to the border, Harris vowed in a TV interview to revive the legislation. She noted that she would have placed 1,500 new border agents on the southern border, added funding to block the flow of fentanyl into the US and “put more resources into our ability to prosecute transnational criminal organizations.”

“We have a broken immigration system. And it needs to be fixed,” Harris said on MSNBC. “My commitment is that when I’m elected president, if the American people will have me, I will bring that bill back and sign it. And we need a comprehensive plan that includes what we need to do to not only strengthen our border, but also to deal with the fact that we need to create pathways for people to gain citizenship.”

Harris faces the challenge of satisfying the Democratic base with her immigration policies while also appealing to the moderate voters and Republicans her campaign is trying to win over in Arizona. Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, a Republican who praised Trump during the former president’s trip to the border, said he had “mixed emotions” about Harris’ visit so late in her tenure as vice president.

“Are we coming for political reasons or do we end up actually hiring a frontier that needs help?” Daniels said.

The Biden administration has moved to the right on immigration over the past three years. Most recently, Biden signed an executive order imposing new asylum restrictions at the southern border in June.

As her campaign takes shape, Harris has faced questions about her views on immigration, including her past promise to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, known as ” Dreamers”.

Still, Harris’ immigration policies are a stark contrast to Trump, who has pledged to carry out mass deportations if he returns to the White House and made false claims about immigrants eating pets in Ohio.

Harris’ focus on bringing back the bipartisan immigration law was welcome news to some border experts in Arizona.

“We have to wait and see if they bring that bill back, if there are changes. But there were a lot of provisions there that we liked,” said Luis Ramirez Thomas, president of Ramírez Advisors Inter-National, a government affairs and economic development firm that describes itself as specializing in “cross-border business solutions.”

“Additional funding for customs staff, there has been some funding for infrastructure,” he said. “Was the bill ideal to meet everyone’s needs? No, but it was definitely a step in the right direction.”

During his time in the state, Harris will go to the Raul H. Castro Port of Entry for official briefings on operations and progress on disrupting the flow of fentanyl through the southern border.

Fierros, the LUCHA spokesman, said he hopes Harris takes a broader view of immigration during her remarks.

“What we want is not to be so strictly focused on what’s happening at the border or in terms of border security,” Fierros said. “But also the fact that this country has a long history of positive contributions that immigrants have made to this country, and the fact that there is a great need for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship.”

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