By Mary Ann Akers
(Washington Bureau Chief, The Daily Beast)
Kamala Harris heads to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona Friday seeking to rehabilitate one of her most serious vulnerabilities and take on Donald Trump’s fear mongering over illegal immigration.
“The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,” the vice president plans to say, according to a senior Harris campaign official briefed on the event.
Harris will turn the tables, and blame the ex-president for the immigration crisis at the southern border by spotlighting his leading role last spring in killing a bipartisan deal to curb illegal border crossings.
A preview of her speech in Douglas, Arizona, across from neighboring Agua Prieta in Mexico, focuses not on the surreal, far-right pet-eating conspiracies espoused by Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, but on Trump’s tangible record. He demanded that congressional Republicans who he largely controls reject a border enforcement bill negotiated by senators on both sides of the aisle. Trump has long viewed bipartisan governance as weak, and a political win for vulnerable Democratic congressional candidates in this high-stakes election cycle could have stung the GOP.
On Friday, Harris plans to announce that, if elected, she’ll reintroduce the bill, which would multiply border agents and strengthen asylum laws. She’ll tout her experience as a former prosecutor taking on drug and human smuggling cartels and announce that stopping theflow of lethal fentanyl across the border will be “a top priority,” the senior campaign aide said. Harris will propose adding new fentanyl detection machines at U.S. entry points. An ad touting her proposals is running in Arizona and other border states.
The Democratic candidate’s trip to the border is designed to counter claims by Trump and his MAGA allies that Harris and the Biden administration opened the floodgates to “illegal aliens.” Both Trump and Vance have spread outlandish claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been stealing and eating residents’ pet dogs and cats, leading a group to seek criminal charges against them.
The Trump campaign on Friday ridiculed Harris, who Trump routinely calls the Biden administration’s “border czar,” for taking a trip to the border to “rewrite the past 44 months of chaos, crime, and bloodshed caused by her open border policy.” Campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said voters are “smart enough to realize Kamala Harris has been in charge of the border for four years and she has failed.”
As anti-immigration sentiment among voters has soared, according to Gallup polling, Trump and Vance have hammered the issue constantly on the campaign trail. At a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, last weekend, Trump declared, “I am your border president, your border president. Kamala would be your invasion president.”
Recent polls show that even as Harris matches or surpasses Trump in national head-to-head polls, the GOP candidate still owns the immigration narrative. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll finds a significant number of voters trust Trump over Harris to handle the issue of the border.
But Harris campaign advisers think the Democrat’s visit to the border Friday will help narrow the gap on her longstanding political vulnerability.