DOUGLAS, Ariz. – With high temperatures expected to reach nearly triple digits in late September, Vice President Kamala Harris will dive into one of the most heated issues of the presidential campaign on Friday: immigration.
Harris was making her first trip to the southern U.S. border in more than three years. It is her first visit since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she rose to the top of the list.
“We have a broken immigration system,” Harris said in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday. “And that needs to be fixed.”
Harris will call for stronger security measures, including new fentanyl detection machines and more Border Patrol agents, a senior campaign aide told NBC News. The aide said she also plans to pressure the Chinese government to take tougher action against companies that make the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl. Her team is also releasing a new ad touting her record as California’s attorney general and highlighting her ability to prosecute transnational gangs and drug traffickers.
Harris will also propose on Friday that the US tighten asylum restrictions, the aide said.
She will propose going further than Biden’s executive action this year, which said if the number of encounters at the border rises above the seven-day average of 1,500, migrants crossing the border illegally will not be able to seek asylum. Harris plans to demand a lower average of illegal border crossings before the restriction takes effect, a senior campaign official said. The official also said Harris would deploy stronger emergency authorities.
It’s a notable effort to rename a vice president in an administration that has had a record 10 million illegal border crossings since Biden took office. (The number of crossings has fallen dramatically since he issued this year’s executive action to tighten asylum restrictions.)
When discussing immigration, Harris has increasingly attacked Trump over his efforts to end a bipartisan border funding deal this year.
“He has pushed aside a bill that would actually have been a solution because he wants to address a problem,” Harris said in her MSNBC interview.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., argued that the Senate-negotiated bill did not go far enough, while Republicans have tried to brand Harris as the administration’s “border czar.” Her aides have insisted that her purview was much narrower and that she was tasked with investigating the root causes of migration in the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
“She keeps talking about how she supposedly wants to fix the border,” Trump said at a news conference at Trump Tower on Thursday. “Why didn’t she fix it almost four years ago?”
An NBC News poll taken this month found that 54% of registered voters thought Trump would do a better job of securing the border and controlling immigration, compared to 33% who said the same about Harris.
The poll also found that 57% of registered voters thought Harris would be better at treating immigrants humanely and protecting immigrants’ rights, while 29% said Trump would be better.
“They are infecting our country,” Trump said on Thursday. “They are destroying our country.”
The heated debate over immigration is especially crucial on the battlefield in Arizona, where rancher John Ladd’s family has owned 16,000 acres in Cochise County for more than a century.
“Trump figured it out,” he said in an interview, adding that the number of border apprehensions on his property peaked at about 150 a day during the Biden administration but was much lower under Trump.
“They come through me every day,” he said. “But they’re going to live with you.”
Miles of border wall were built on his property — and had to be repaired several times early this year after smugglers punched a hole in it, he said. He is skeptical of Harris’ tougher talk on immigration.
“That’s nonsense,” he said. “That is an absolute lie. She doesn’t care about the border. She wants it open. So I don’t believe a word she says.”
Danya Acosta, a city council member and former sheriff’s deputy in nearby Douglas, said Harris has won her over, though she is frustrated by the campaign’s heated rhetoric on immigration.
“Many of us here in the border communities are a little tired of the polarization that has occurred when it comes to this issue,” she said.
She said she voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 — but was disappointed by what she viewed as Biden’s lax border policies. The failure of the bipartisan border bill in the Republican-controlled House changed her mind.
“That really influenced my vote because this isn’t about an issue – it’s about political gain,” she said. “And that’s really sad that people are being used as pawns for political reasons.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
