Vice President Kamala Harris went on the offensive against former President Donald Trump on immigration Friday during her visit to the southern border in Arizona as she tries to turn a political vulnerability on its head.
Immigration has featured prominently in the 2024 presidential election, with polls showing voters placing more trust in Trump to handle the issue than Harris.
Democrats, grappling with years of border crises, have tried to gain ground by pointing to the bipartisan border measure that congressional Republicans blocked earlier this year after Trump came out against it. Harris on Friday lambasted Trump for his role in stymying that bill.
“It was the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades. It was endorsed by the Border Patrol union. And it should be in effect today, producing results in real time, right now, for our country,” she said at a rally in Douglas, a town on the US-Mexico border.
“But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, ‘Stop the bill,’” she said. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
She said she would ask Congress to pass the measure if she is elected, and would sign it into law. She also laid out a series of proposals that she said were “not just about some rhetoric at a rally,” but would help stem the flow of migrants into the United States.
Advisers to the vice president remain concerned about the gap between the candidates on immigration. But they also cite recent polling showing Trump’s lead on the issue eroding since Harris took over from President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket – providing them an opportunity, they say, to amplify their message and close the gap further.
Harris outlined plans during her Arizona stop Friday that would make it even harder to lift border restrictions that have largely barred migrants from seeking asylum in the US.
It’s the clearest example yet of the campaign doubling down on border security by embracing strict rules that have been condemned by some corners of the Democratic Party. Harris would go a step further than President Joe Biden’s June executive action by making the threshold for lifting restrictions harder to reach.
“Solutions are at hand if we focus on fixing a problem and not running on a problem,” Harris said.
She said she’d work with Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for “hardworking immigrants who have been here for years, for years, and deserve to have a system that works,” as well as “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children, who are allowed to live and work in the US under an Obama-era program but generally cannot become citizens under current law.
“They are American in every way. But still, they do not have an earned pathway to citizenship. And this problem has gone unsolved at this point now for decades,” Harris said. “The same goes for farmworkers who ensure that we have food on our tables and sustain our agricultural industry – and they too have been in legal limbo for years because politicians have refused to come together and fix our broken immigration system.”
Earlier this year, Biden announced an executive action severely limiting the ability of migrants to seek asylum at the US southern border if they crossed unlawfully – a departure from decadeslong protocol. Immigrant advocates have likened the executive action to Trump-era policies.
The measure can be turned on and off and lifted when there’s a daily average of fewer than 1,500 encounters between ports of entry, among other criteria. It remains in place.
Homeland Security officials have credited the action for driving down border crossings to the lowest point since 2020.
Trump alluded to his current polling edge Thursday as he slammed his rival ahead of her visit to the border.
“Why would she go to the border now, playing right into the hand of her opponent?” the former president told reporters at Trump Tower in New York. “She keeps talking about how she supposedly wants to fix the border. We would merely ask: ‘Why didn’t she do it four years ago?’”
Part of the Harris campaign’s strategy to counter Trump includes a new ad, titled “Never Backed Down,” that will run in Arizona and other battleground states highlighting Harris’ previous border-related work and outlining her plans, including hiring more border agents.
“She put cartel members and drug traffickers behind bars, and she will secure our border,” the narrator says.
An early strategy
The Harris campaign signaled early on that it planned to counter Trump’s attacks on the vice president and the administration’s handling of border security. Only days after she launched her presidential bid, campaign officials released a video drawing a contrast between Harris and Trump on immigration policy – notably leaning on border security.
“Kamala Harris supports increasing the number of Border Patrol agents. Donald Trump blocked a bill to increase the number of Border Patrol agents,” the voiceover in the video stated.
Harris previously visited the border as vice president and has cited her work as a border-state senator and state attorney general.
Friday’s visit comes at a time when border crossings are the lowest they’ve been since 2020 – and follows a recent New York Times/Siena College poll that showed Trump leading in the battleground state. A Fox News survey of the state that was released on Thursday found no clear leader, with Trump at 50% and Harris at 47% among likely voters.
US officials have touted back-to-back months of low border crossings, citing recent executive action to curb asylum access at the southern border, even as Trump has levied attacks over the Biden administration’s handling of border security.
The dramatic recent drop in border crossings has provided a reprieve to the Biden administration after grappling with record crossings amid unprecedented migration across the Western hemisphere.
Over that time, Republicans have falsely referred to Harris as the “border czar,” casting her as solely responsible for the management of the US-Mexico border. It’s a title that Harris team has been trying to shake off since the moment Biden assigned her to tackle the root causes of migration in 2021.
Harris has only occasionally talked about her assignment, which, sources said, has shown early success in Central America as a result of major private-sector investment. But that’s been bundled with the administration’s larger migration issues.
Harris campaign officials think she has a case on immigration: using the failed bipartisan border measure to cast Trump as unserious at the border and citing her record as California attorney general tackling transnational criminal gangs.
Campaign allies have also stressed the need to look beyond the border and speak to broader immigration reform, pulling from the vice president’s background in the Senate and in California working on immigrant issues.
“It’s good she’s going. It’s helpful to get her message out there,” one source close to the campaign told CNN. “Obviously, she’s at the border – that’s the primary focus. But also talking more broadly about the whole system.”
Last week, Harris slammed Trump over his immigration proposals, citing his contentious policies, including his proposal for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, to paint a dark picture of her Republican rival.
“While we fight to move our nation forward to a brighter future, Donald Trump and his extremist allies will keep trying to pull us backward. We all remember what they did to tear families apart, and now they have pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation in American history,” she said at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute leadership conference in Washington.
“Imagine what that would look like and what that would be. How’s that going to happen? Massive raids, massive detention camps. What are they talking about?” she said.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Kit Maher contributed to this report.