Harris fights political headwinds on immigration in close race with Trump

Vice President Kamala Harris is facing stiff political headwinds on immigration and border security, with public polls, voter interviews and campaign ads reflecting the challenge she is confronting in the final stage of a close-fought presidential race.

Swing voters in battleground states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania have expressed a lack of clarity on, or unease about, Harris’s record, with her embrace of more liberal positions earlier in her political career under a spotlight. The country has adopted a harder posture against undocumented immigrants in recent years, putting more trust in Republicans than Democrats on border security, surveys show. And former president Donald Trump and his allies are focusing relentlessly on the issue, often using false attacks or racist tropes to portray Harris as soft on the border.

Harris has sought to underline her experience as a border state prosecutor as well as her support for a border security bill that Trump opposed. Her allies acknowledge that she started her campaign facing an uphill climb on immigration but say she has made headway, in part with a strategy that involves challenging Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. At the same time, she has had to strike a difficult balance between a Democratic Party base that is sometimes wary of moving too far right and swing voters who favor more restrictive laws.

“He insults Latinos, scapegoats immigrants - and it’s not just what he says, it’s what he will do,” Harris said during a rally in Phoenix last week. “If elected, you can be sure he will bring back family separation policies, only on a much greater scale than last time.”

Illegal crossings at the southern U.S. border are down sharply this year after the Biden administration placed broad restrictions on asylum, and experts say that immigration has benefited the U.S. economy. But immigration ranks as one of the top issues for voters in the polls, and the Biden administration’s early struggles to address record numbers of migrants have stuck with some voters.

“I don’t want to go through another four years of what we’re currently going through,” said Denise Alvez, 48, of College Park, Georgia, who identified as an independent who supported Barack Obama and Donald Trump in past elections. As she voted early this year, she said the choice of the Republican nominee was easy.

“It’s just been terrible,” she said, adding that she feels Democrats have been too lax.

Republicans have spent more than $243 million on ads referencing immigration since Biden ended his reelection bid in July, according to data from AdImpact, compared to more than $15 million in immigration-related ads from Harris and her allies. GOP ads have included ominous images portraying a border in chaos and false claims that Biden and Harris released thousands of “illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes.”

Republicans have disparaged Harris as the “border czar,” though she never had any such title. Biden tapped Harris in 2021 to serve as the point person tackling the main reasons people migrate from three Central American countries - Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her role was not to address the influx of migrants at the U.S. southern border, including unprecedented migration from countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador.

Dino Scott, 25, voted for Biden in 2020 but seeing his administration’s handling of the border was one factor in Scott’s decision to support Trump this time around. He feels Harris has handled the issue poorly on the campaign trail, too.

“All she had to do was take accountability on the border, provide a decent timeline to become a citizen and then offer punishments for the people that did come here illegally and then broke the law. That’s all people want to see,” said Scott, as he stood in the crowd at a recent Trump rally in Reno, Nevada.

Harris campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said in a statement that the contrast between Harris and Trump on immigration is that she wants to put “real solutions forward.”

Harris and Biden have frequently pointed to a bipartisan bill they championed which would have made sweeping changes to the nation’s asylum system and included a mechanism to effectively shut down the border when crossings were high. Trump “killed the bill because he preferred to run on a problem, instead of fixing a problem,” Harris said at a recent CNN town hall. Trump said the bill was a “horrible, open borders betrayal of America,” spreading misinformation about the contents of the bill and saying it was weak.

Trump has made the border a central focus of his closing message, vowing to carry out mass deportations as president and frequently lambasting undocumented immigrants with dehumanizing language and talking in misleading or exaggerated terms about the dangers they pose. He has called them “savage criminals” and “animals.”

On the trail, Trump has made false claims about Venezuelan gangs taking over residential buildings in Colorado and promoted inaccurate racist tropes about Haitians eating pets in Ohio. In the final days of the campaign, Trump is promoting an ad that features a woman calling for tougher immigration policies after her 12-year-old daughter was killed by two Venezuelan nationals.

Nov. 5 is “is going to be Liberation Day,” Trump said at a recent rally in New York, where introductory speakers used racist and sexist attacks that disparaged Latinos and others. “I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail and to kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”

Harris has also faced attacks on past comments and positions she took. During her run in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris expressed support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for detained migrants - a position the Trump campaign has highlighted in ads. She also vowed to use executive action to create a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

In a recent Fox News interview, Harris said she would “follow the law” in response to a question about providing gender-affirming surgeries to prisoners. She also pointed out that the Trump administration also offered gender-affirming care to prisoners, which some federal courts have ruled the government is required to do under the Constitution. When it comes to a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, Harris has called on Congress to act and pass comprehensive immigration reform that includes them but has not talked about using executive action to do so.

Biden started his administration signaling a sharp break with the Trump-era policies that were widely criticized by human rights groups. Over time, amid struggles to address a large influx of migrants, he focused more on enforcement of border security. Many Democrats have similarly shifted their focus as they campaign for office.

Cecilia Muñoz, who served as an immigration adviser and director of the Domestic Policy Council under Barack Obama, said the challenge Harris has faced on immigration stems from Trump leaning so heavily on emotion while Harris is actually proposing policy to solve the problem.

“People in this country will gravitate toward anything which feels like a solution, even if it’s crazy. That’s the thing Donald Trump is exploiting,” Muñoz said. “It’s an easy issue to demagogue. An easy issue to engage in emotion. But the solution, the policy, is actually really hard.”

A recent ABC/Ipsos poll found that 56 percent of Americans favor deporting all undocumented immigrants, up 20 points from eight years ago. A Washington Post-Schar School poll of seven swing states found voters trusted Trump over Harris by 52 percent to 33 percent on immigration, his biggest advantage of any issue. However, several polls show that Harris has cut into Trump’s advantage on immigration.

The vice president does not focus heavily on immigration on the campaign trail. When she does, she often highlights her experience prosecuting gangs and transnational criminal organizations and expresses her desire for a secure border. On some occasions, particularly before more heavilyLatino audiences, she has discussed her ability to secure the border and act humanely toward immigrants already in the United States.

“I think it is a false choice for people who say you do one or the other. I believe we must do both. I believe we can do both,” she said at a recent Univision town hall in Las Vegas.

Some of the ads she has run include an image of her speaking with Border Patrol agents or footage of the border wall.

“Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris,” one ad says. In a Spanish-language ad, the narrator says: “Trump habla. Kamala lucha” - Trump talks. Harris fights.

Some Harris supporters said immigration was important to them and they didn’t think Trump would handle the issue well.

“I don’t think it’s been handled in a perfect way, but I don’t think that you can do mass deportation,” said Dawn McGlohon, 58, of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. “And really, he didn’t do anything as president. The wall didn’t happen - or just a small percent of it did and Mexico didn’t pay for it.”

McGlohon, a retired business owner, said she wished Biden and Harris had “come up with a way to get things under control sooner because there were a lot of people coming in that shouldn’t,” but she was pleased to see the action they eventually took.

Trump and his allies are hoping a focus on immigration will help solidify his base, as well as win over some suburban women, swing voters and voters of color. He has sought to pit Latinos and Black Americans against migrants who have arrived in recent years, arguing that they are taking “Black and Hispanic jobs,” a characterization that many Americans have found offensive and economists said was false.

In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as Trump voters lined up for Trump’s recent visit, 58-year-old Tasha Lee sat on her steps a short distance away, venting about both parties. “He ain’t for us,” she said of Trump, meaning “the common people.”

But Lee, who is Black and identified as a Democrat, also said she felt the government was doing too much for migrants crossing the border and not enough for her. “They got a place, they got cars, they got jobs, they got everything,” she said of new immigrants. “And why are they getting that? Because they’re taking it away from us to give to them.”

She declined to say she would vote for either Harris or Trump - or whether she would vote at all.