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Kamala Harris promised a fresh clampdown on illegal immigration at the US’s southern frontier as she sought to present a tougher stance on border security with the presidential race entering its final stretch.
On her first campaign trip to the US-Mexico border the vice-president pledged to move beyond measures imposed by the Biden administration, promising “further action” to prevent illegal crossings, tighter asylum measures and “more severe criminal charges” for illegal entrants.
“While we understand that many people are desperate to migrate to the United States our system must be orderly and secure,” she told a crowd in the Arizona city of Douglas.
The tougher rhetoric comes as the vice-president seeks to shake perceptions of a lax approach to migration and narrow the polling gap with Donald Trump on a crucial electoral issue.
While polls put Harris neck and neck with Trump overall, the former president consistently leads her on the question of border security. A recent NBC News poll gave Trump a 21-point advantage among voters on the topic.
The number of people crossing the country’s southern frontier surged to record levels under Joe Biden, peaking last December. But apprehensions have since fallen sharply after the president introduced an executive order including emergency measures to shutter the frontier.
Trump has made immigration a focal point of his campaign, accusing new arrivals of “poisoning the blood of our country” and proposing a crackdown involving militarised mass deportations.
Harris on Friday sought to push back, repeatedly pointing to the former president’s efforts to scuttle a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year, accusing him of an “abdication of leadership” and of prioritising politics over real solutions.
“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said of the bill. “He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill. He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Harris said that if elected she would work with Congress to pass the border security bill, as well as unspecified actions to keep the border closed between legal crossing points and barring some illegal entrants from being able to claim asylum.
Trump has sought to tie Harris to the surge in illegal border crossings during Biden’s term in office, dubbing her the president’s “border tsar”, a label her campaign has rejected.
A Trump campaign spokesperson on Friday dismissed Harris’s border visit as a “desperate attempt to fool Americans into forgetting the chaos and devastation she has unleashed over her four years as border tsar”.