WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris will visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday during a campaign stop in the key battleground state of Arizona, with immigration still one of the biggest debts in the 2024 election.
Harris will visit Douglas, Arizona, about 190 miles southeast of Tucson and home to Arizona’s second-largest port of entry along the southern border.
A Harris campaign aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the trip, said Harris plans to speak about border security during the trip. The aide said Harris will emphasize that she is “pushing forward the toughest bipartisan border security plan in a generation,” something former President Donald Trump “shut down for political reasons.” he said.
A national poll this month from USA TODAY and Suffolk University found that by a 50% to 47% margin, voters believe Republican candidate Trump will do a better job of handling immigration than Democratic candidate Harris. . A Quinnipiac University poll this week found Trump with a 53%-45% lead on immigration.
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Harris has faced criticism from the Trump campaign over her role as Biden’s central figure in overseeing efforts to stop migrants at the southern border and address root causes. President Trump is pushing for “mass deportation” of illegal immigrants who are in the country illegally. He also continues to push for construction of a border wall.
“After almost four years, border czar Kamala Harris has decided, for political reasons, that it’s time to go to our broken southern border,” Trump said in a statement on his former Twitter account, X. “What a shame that she waited this long while admitting millions of people into our country from prisons, mental hospitals, and criminal cells around the world.”
As vice president, Harris previously visited the southern border during a 2021 trip to El Paso, Texas. President Joe Biden visited the southern border in Brownsville, Texas, in February, months before withdrawing from the 2024 election.
In the 2020 election, Biden narrowly won Arizona with 11 electoral votes. Mr. Trump currently leads Ms. Harris in Arizona by 1.6 percentage points, according to Real Clear Politics’ average of recent polls.
“Our immigration system is broken and we need to fix it,” Harris said in an interview on MSNBC Wednesday night.
Harris, seeking to flip the script on an issue that has historically been weak for Democrats, announced earlier this year that the Biden administration would support bipartisan border reforms that include tough new restrictions on asylum seekers and additional resources for Border Patrol agents. He attacked President Trump for encouraging Republican senators to block the bill.
“Donald Trump got on the phone and called some people in Congress and told them to repeal the bill,” Harris said during a Sept. 10 debate with Trump. “Do you know why? Because he preferred to deal with problems rather than solve them.”
Read more: After record years, migrant arrivals plummet at U.S.-Mexico border
After the bill failed in Congress, Biden announced in June that if the number of people entering the country illegally reaches an average of 2,500 per day per week, he would take executive action to deny immigrants who do not enter the country through legal ports of entry. We took the following steps.
Since the number of illegal immigrants surged to record highs in 2023, the number of immigrants entering the country has been decreasing every month for the past five months as of August, with more than 300,000 people entering the country illegally in December alone. Ta. Early in her administration, Ms. Harris famously echoed the Border Patrol’s arguments and told immigrants, “Don’t come.”
Contact Joey Garrison at X (formerly Twitter, @Joeygarrison).