Vice President Kamala Harris heads to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona on Friday, the first time she has been to the border since a visit to El Paso in 2021 and coming on the heels of her campaign being dogged by her past on the subject of illegal immigration.
Harris has faced frequent attacks from her Republican opponent, former President Trump, and the Border Patrol Union who argue that she is weak on border security, an issue that many Republicans see as the vice president’s political Achilles’ heel.
“After years of not just ignoring the problem, but helping create it, Vice President Kamala is finally headed down to the border,” the National Border Patrol Council said in a statement. “This is nothing more than for her to check the box, but what it is in reality, is a slap in the face towards the men and women that put their lives on the line every day, and also a slap in the face to the American public. Where has she been?”
HARRIS HEADS TO SOUTHERN BORDER LOOKING TO FLIP SCRIPT ON IMMIGRATION CRITICISMS
Harris’ campaign has pointed to her past as a prosecutor, taking on transnational criminal gangs, and says she is the candidate to secure the border as she backs a bipartisan funding bill.
But Harris has a lengthy history on immigration at the national level.
Harris, as a California senator, was on the far-left of the Democratic Party on immigration, and in 2018 she pushed her colleagues in the Senate to reject a request by the Trump administration for more funding for immigration detention beds and Border Patrol agents.
In a letter to senators on the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2018, Harris and other senators called for them to “reject President Trump’s FY 19 funding request for a costly and ineffective border wall, new Border Patrol agents, and a large increase in U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel and detention beds.”
“We urge you to reduce funding for the administration’s reckless immigration enforcement operations that are tearing families apart and harming our economy.”
HARRIS LEANS IN ON BORDER SECURITY AND TRUMP RELISHES THE FIGHT
She also grilled Ronald Vitiello, who was former President Trump’s nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whether he was “aware of the perception” of parallels between ICE and the KKK.
“Are you aware that there is a perception that ICE is administering its power in a way that is causing fear and intimidation, particularly among immigrants and specifically among immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America?” she asked again.
In recently revealed footage, Harris is seen at a rally chanting “Up, up with education, down, down with deportation” at a rally which also featured now-disgraced actor Jussie Smollett.
Harris launched a bid for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2019. Her campaign included a promise to expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) by executive order, which gives protection to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors.
She said that she would eliminate age requirements on applications and use parole authority to create a “parole in place” program to put those illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.
Also she promised to shield illegal immigrant parents of American citizens and green card holders from deportation by executive order. Overall, her plan was predicted to protect over six million illegal immigrants from deportation.
Harris became vice president in 2021 and the administration immediately rolled back a number of Trump-era initiatives and attempted to place a moratorium on deportations.
Migrant numbers skyrocketed, and Biden told reporters in March that Harris would be put in charge of tackling root causes, issues like climate change, poverty and violence that the administration believes was driving migrants north.
It quickly led to Harris being dubbed by media outlets and Republicans as the “border czar.” The White House rejected that title, but it has stuck with her ever since and made her a figurehead along with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for the crisis.
After the assignment by Biden, and with numbers skyrocketing through subsequent months to record highs, Harris immediately came under pressure to visit the border as the White House said her role was more diplomatic than related to the border directly. She instead went to Mexico and Guatemala and had a stern message for migrants that upset immigrant activists.
“Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders,” she said. “If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”
The pressure kept rising for her to go to the U.S. border.
“You haven’t been to the border,” NBC’s Lester Holt told her, after she claimed she had been to the border.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris quipped.
Later that month, she went to the border in El Paso, Texas, where she received a briefing and toured a processing center while meeting with advocates and providers.
Harris would largely be unseen through the rest of 2021 and 2022 on the root causes strategy, although a private sector initiative to draw investment to tackle those root causes would continue.
In June 2022, she traveled to the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and met with other leaders to discuss ways to handle the crisis. During that summit, she announced that $3.2 billion in commitments from private sector companies had been secured.
She also came under fire for declaring the border was secure despite the ongoing crisis and mass releases into the interior.
“The border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed,” Harris said on NBC.
Harris made few appearances in 2023 relating to the border crisis, although her private investment strategy continued to bring in additional commitments from companies.
But the crisis did not stay out of the news, and 2023 broke new records for enormous amounts of migrant encounters and a number of chaotic scenes at the border.
Fiscal year 2023 broke the record for encounters with over 2.4 million, while December had nearly 250,000 encounters in a single month.
While the White House continued to reject the “border czar” narrative, Harris put her support behind a bipartisan Senate agreement to provide more funding to the border and reduce migrant crossings when they reach a certain level.
She also backed a number of executive orders by President Biden, who would implement a limit on asylum and efforts to provide a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are spouses of U.S. citizens.
She has sought to portray herself as tougher on the border than former President Trump.
Now, with a stop in Douglas, Arizona, she aims to show that she is better prepared than Trump to tackle the combustible issue of immigration and what Republicans have spotlighted as the crisis at the southern border.
“We need a comprehensive plan,” Harris said Wednesday in an interview with MSNBC. “That includes what we need to do to fortify not only our border but deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to earn citizenship.”
Along with the border stop, the Harris campaign is launching a new ad that will play in Arizona and other battleground states that spotlights her past border efforts and plans.
“She put cartel members and drug traffickers behind bars, and she will secure our border,” the narrator in the commercial says.
Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
