Kamala Harris will tackle the politically explosive issue of illegal immigration with a visit to the US-Mexican border Friday, in a bid to blunt one of Donald Trump’s main attack lines in their fight for the White House.
The US vice president’s trip to Arizona, her first to the border since replacing President Joe Biden as Democratic nominee in July, comes as polls show the subject remains one of her biggest vulnerabilities against the Republican.
Harris will call for tougher border security in a major speech in the border town of Douglas, and accuse Trump of killing off attempts to pass a bipartisan migration bill to boost his own election chances, her campaign said.
“The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,” she plans to say, according to her campaign.
Arizona is also one of the half-dozen battleground states that are expected to decide the agonizingly close November 5 election, and the one where polls show Harris may have to do the most work.
Republican former president Trump has turbocharged the border issue in recent weeks as he seeks an edge against Harris, America’s first female, Black and South Asian vice president.
He has called for mass deportations, amplified bogus claims about migrants eating pet cats and dogs, and stepped up his racist rhetoric about an “invasion” of illegal immigrants.
– ‘Save her airfare’ –
On the eve of Harris’s visit, which is just her second to the Mexican border as vice president, Trump accused his rival of having “completely destroyed” the frontier.
“She should save her airfare. She should go back to the White House and tell the president to close the border,” he said in New York on Thursday.
Trump is set to hold a campaign event in Michigan, another key swing state, after a tense meeting in New York with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on US support for Kyiv.
Recent polls have seen Harris eating into Trump’s lead on migration with voters, yet it still remains a weak spot for Harris, with record numbers of illegal border crossings under her and Biden’s watch.
But Harris points to the fact that numbers have plummeted since Biden signed an executive order in June temporarily closing the border to asylum seekers — to around 58,000 in August from a peak of 250,000 last December.
The 59-year-old will meet border agents during her visit, call for action to stop the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl across the border, and talk up her former career as a prosecutor involved in tackling gangs smuggling drugs across the border, the campaign said.
Harris will also accuse Trump of lobbying Republicans in the US Congress to tank last year’s bill on migration, which would have given more funding to border security, because he feared it would hurt him politically.
– Trump doubles down –
Republicans for their part have accused her of flip-flopping on whether to continue with the wall along the 1,900-mile (3,050-kilometer) border that Trump made one of his signature policies.
They have also focused on her role early in the Biden administration when the president tasked her with looking into the causes of illegal migration from Central America — falsely calling her a “border czar” and implying that she had overall control over US border policy.
Harris has struggled with the subject in the past, including in a widely mocked interview in 2021 when she defensively claimed that “we’ve been to the border” when she personally had not, and added: “And I haven’t been to Europe.”
Trump has meanwhile doubled down on his divisive rhetoric targeting migrants, with the 78-year-old billionaire seeing it as appealing to his base of largely white, blue-collar voters.
In his remarks on Thursday, Trump also repeated his claim that migrants were “infecting our country,” using language that Biden has previously compared to that used by Nazi Germany.
Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have in recent weeks played up false stories about Haitian migrants eating pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio.
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