Kamala Harris will tackle the politically explosive issue of illegal immigration with a trip to the US-Mexican border on Friday, seeking to blunt one of Donald Trump’s main attack lines in his fight for the White House.
The US vice president’s visit to Arizona is his first visit to the border since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in July, as polls show the topic is one of his biggest weaknesses against Republicans.
According to her campaign, Harris will call for tougher border security in a major speech in the border city of Douglas and accuse Trump of thwarting efforts to pass a bipartisan immigration bill to boost his re-election prospects.
According to her campaign, she plans to say, “The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games.”
Arizona is also one of a half-dozen battleground states expected to decide a bitterly contested election on November 5, and where polls show Harris may have the most work to do.
Republican former President Trump has escalated the border issue in recent weeks as he seeks an edge against Vice President Harris, America’s first woman, Black and South Asian.
He has called for mass deportations, made bogus claims about immigrants eating pet cats and dogs, and stepped up his racist rhetoric about an “invasion” of illegal immigrants.
‘Save his airfare’
On the eve of Harris’ visit, which is her second visit to the Mexican border as vice president, Trump accused his rival of “completely destroying” the border.
“They should save their airfare. They should go back to the White House and ask the president to close the border,” he said in New York on Thursday.
Following a tense meeting in New York with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over US support for Kiev, Trump is set to hold a campaign event in Michigan, another key swing state.
Recent polls have seen Harris eat away at Trump’s lead on immigration with voters, yet it still remains a weak spot for Harris, with record numbers of illegal border crossings under her and Biden’s watch. There are matters to be done.
But Harris points to the fact that the numbers have dropped since Biden signed an executive order in June temporarily closing the border to asylum seekers — from a peak of 250,000 last December through August. By about 58,000 in.
The 59-year-old will meet with border agents during her visit, call for action to stem the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl across the border and talk about her former career as a prosecutor tackling gangs that smuggle drugs across the border. Will do. the campaign said.
Harris will also accuse Trump of lobbying Republicans in the US Congress to pass last year’s bill on immigration, which would have given more money to border security, because she feared it would harm her politically.
Trump doubled down
Republicans, for their part, have accused him of negligence in continuing to build a 1,900-mile (3,050-kilometre) border wall, which Trump has made one of his signature policies.
They have also focused on his early role in the Biden administration when the President tasked him with looking into the causes of illegal migration from Central America – he was incorrectly called the “border czar” and implied that the US border He had overall control over the policy.
Harris has struggled on the topic in the past, including in a widely mocked interview in 2021 when she defensively claimed “we’ve been to the border” even though she had not visited in person, and said : “And I have not been to Europe.”
Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his divisive rhetoric targeting immigrants, something the 78-year-old billionaire sees as attractive to his base of largely white, blue-collar voters.
In his remarks Thursday, Trump also repeated his claim that immigrants were “infecting our country,” using language that Biden previously compared to that used by Nazi Germany.
Trump and his running mate JD Vance have in recent weeks pushed false stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets in the city of Springfield, Ohio.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
