This week the House passed a Republican-led resolution condemning Kamala Harris for her role in the Biden administration’s handling of migration, part of a ramped up effort to portray the presumptive Democratic nominee as dangerously lax on border security.
Following Joe Biden’s decision to bow out of the presidential race, Donald Trump has also unleashed a barrage of fresh attacks on the US vice-president’s record on immigration, a politically volatile issue expected to play a central role in the November presidential election.
“She was the border czar, but she never went to the border,” Trump said, repeating two falsehoods in a single attack line during a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday.
As vice-president, Harris was handed a daunting mission at the onset of her term: to address the “root causes” of migration from the northern triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. But at no point was she put in charge of border policy. That is the responsibility of the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was with Harris when she visited the border in June 2021, three months after she was given the assignment.
Instead, Harris’s mandate, as laid out by the president, was to meet with government officials and private sector partners to tackle enduring problems in the region, such as poverty, violence and a lack of economic opportunity, that drive people to migrate from their home countries to the United States, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior adviser of immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“It was a diplomatic and development focus,” she said, “not a border focus.”
The distinction has not stopped Republicans from misleadingly branding Harris as the nation’s “border czar” and blaming her for the sharp upticks in migration under the Biden administration. In a statement on Thursday, House speaker Mike Johnson, accused the vice-president of having done “nothing to address the worsening crisis at the border”.
“The result of her inaction has been record high illegal crossings, overwhelmed communities and an evisceration of the rule of law,” he said.
Republicans are pouring tens of millions of dollars into ads hammering that connection while highlighting past comments in which Harris said expressed an openness to certain progressive-leaning proposals, such as reimagining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and decriminalizing border crossings.
Democrats’ tolerance for such immigration policies, however, has receded greatly since then, as migration levels climbed and it became a top issue for voters. For the first time in decades, a majority of Americans say there should be less immigration, according to a Gallup survey.
As encounters at the border reached record levels last year, Harris endorsed a bipartisan border security package opposed by many immigration rights advocates that would have dramatically limited the number of people allowed to claim asylum at the US-Mexico border while bolstering funding for asylum and border patrol officials and for combatting fentanyl smuggling. But congressional Republicans abandoned the proposal after Trump urged them not to hand Biden an election-year political victory.
With Congress refusing to act, Biden issued an executive order in June that temporarily suspended asylum between ports of entry.
While the number of border crossings between legal ports of entry had already fallen from a record high of 250,000 in December, due in part to increased enforcement by Mexico, it plunged further in the months since Biden’s clampdown took effect.
In June, border patrol made 83,536 arrests, the lowest tally since Biden took office in January 2021.
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Early on in her career, as the district attorney of San Francisco, Harris quickly established herself as a vocal supporter of immigrant rights, publicly denouncing legislation that would have criminalized providing assistance to undocumented immigrants.
But in 2008, she broke with immigrant rights advocates and supported a policy proposed by then mayor Gavin Newsom to notify federal immigration authorities if an undocumented juvenile was arrested in suspicion of a felony, regardless of whether they were actually convicted of a crime, according to the Sacramento Bee. (Later, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris’s campaign told CNN that the policy “could have been applied more fairly”.)
As California’s attorney general, Harris also worked to ensure state agencies assisted undocumented immigrants apply for U visas, a form of immigration relief designated for victims of certain crimes.
In the Senate, where Harris was elected in 2016, she became a leading advocate for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, and an outspoken critic of Trump-era border policies. In her maiden speech as a US senator, Harris assailed Trump’s policies targeting immigrants. “I know what a crime looks like, and I will tell you: an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal,” she said, a refrain Republicans have resurfaced to use against her.
Many immigration advocates recall her sharp questioning of Trump officials during a senate hearing on the administration’s policy of separating children from their parents as a form of immigration deterrence.
As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris unveiled a plan to shield millions of undocumented people from deportation through the use of deferred actions programs and make it easier for Dreamers to apply for green cards. The Biden administration recently announced a series of similar executive moves.
But as the administration’s chief liason to the three northern triangle countries, progress can be hard to measure, analysts say.
“She was given something that is not a quick fix and it’s arguable whether or not you can make substantial change in only one presidential term,” said Cardinal Brown, citing the endemic nature of some of the issues.
Harris’s efforts to improve economic opportunity in the region have generated $5.2bn in private sector commitments since May 2021, the White House said. Apprehensions of migrants from those countries fell considerably between the 2021 and 2023 fiscal years, even as migration from across the hemisphere surged.
At the same time, the narrow strategy, focusing solely on Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, was not reactive to the “paradigm shift” taking place at the southern border, Cardinal Brown said. Now people are fleeing crises all over the world, with a growing number of arrivals coming from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti.
Harris also struggled to overcome early stumbles. During her first trip to Guatemala, the vice-president, delivered a speech in which she memorably told people considering migrating north: “Do not come. Do not come.” The statement, which was instantly turned into a meme, was widely panned by immigration advocates who saw it as tone-deaf and dismissive of the harsh conditions that cause people to flee – the very issues she was tasked with improving.
While in Guatemala, Harris sat for an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, who pressed her on why she hadn’t yet visited the US-Mexico border.
“I’ve never been to Europe,” a frustrated Harris responded. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”
Republicans again seized on the exchange to accuse her of ignoring an issue that is front-of-mind for many Americans. Harris visited the border shortly after, but her approval ratings sank and didn’t recover.
Yet despite conservatives’ yearslong effort to tie the vice-president to the Biden administration’s challenges at the border, new public opinion research found that immigration was not one of the top issues voters associated with Harris – at least not yet.
“Republicans are really enthusiastically trying to tie her to that, but the voters don’t,” said Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for the Democratic research group Blueprint, which conducted the survey.
While immigration was a clear potential vulnerability for Harris, as it is for most Democratic candidates, Roth Smith said she came to the issue with considerably less baggage than Biden had.
“We’re not at some catastrophic level of doubt around her record on immigration,” he said. “Trump just has a trust advantage because he hasn’t shut up about immigration for eight years.”
Many immigration advocates, meanwhile, see hope in Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, who was elected to public office in a border state with a large undocumented population.
Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigration advocacy group, America’s Voice, called Harris a “champion for Dreamers” and other undocumented people living in the United States.
Cárdenas was confident Harris will draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who has pledged to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history”, removing “millions of illegal migrants”. But she urged the vice-president to go further by articulating a vision to expand legal pathways to citizenship – policies Harris has advocated for throughout her political career.
“Falling back into an enforcement-only focus would actually be detrimental to her and would impact people that are enthusiastic about her now,” Cárdenas said, adding: “I don’t think she can avoid this issue. She’s going to have to outline it, and my hope is that because she knows it well that she’s going to be a forceful voice and advocate for positive change.”
