By WILL WEISSERT and JONATHAN J. COOPER Associated Press
DOUGLAS, Ariz. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris walked a scrubby stretch of fence line along Arizona’s border with Mexico on Friday, seeking to project an image of strength against illegal migration as she confronts one of her biggest vulnerabilities in the November election.
In her first trip to the international boundary since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris chatted with local Border Patrol leaders as they strode along a rust-colored stretch of wall built during Barack Obama’s presidency. Temperatures in Douglas, Arizona, neared 100 degrees during a conversation that lasted about half an hour.
“They’ve got a tough job, and they need, rightly, support to do their job,” Harris said of the Border Patrol as she entered the Douglas port of entry for a briefing on efforts to block the flow of fentanyl across the border. “They are very dedicated. And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them. And also thank them for the hard work they do.”
Later, she was expected to call for further tightening asylum restrictions, moving beyond President Joe Biden’s policy on an issue where her rival, former President Donald Trump, has an edge with voters. Hundreds of people packed into a gymnasium to hear her speak.
Trump and his fellow Republicans have pounded Harris relentlessly over the Biden administration’s record on migration and fault the vice president for spending little time visiting the border during her time in the White House.
Harris will outline her plan to crack down further on asylum claims and keep the restrictions in place longer compared to the executive order that Biden signed this summer, according to a campaign official who spoke on condition of anonymity because Harris had not yet made the announcement. The official briefed reporters aboard Air Force 2 en route to Arizona.
Harris arrived by helicopter in Douglas, where she met with Mayor Donald Huish, Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels and County Supervisor Ann English, along with Sen. Mark Kelly and Attorney General Kris Mayes.
Immigration and border security are top issues in Arizona, the only battleground state that borders Mexico and one that contended with a record influx of asylum seekers last year. Voters favor Trump on migration, and Harris has gone on offense to improve her standing on the issue and defuse a key line of political attack for Trump.
In nearly every campaign speech she gives, Harris recounts how a sweeping bipartisan package aiming to overhaul the federal immigration system collapsed in Congress earlier this year after Trump urged top Republicans to oppose it.
“The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,” Harris plans to say, according to an excerpt of her remarks previewed by her campaign.
After the immigration legislation stalled, the Biden administration announced rules that bar migrants from being granted asylum when U.S. officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. Since then, arrests for illegal border crossings have fallen.
Harris will also use her trip to remind voters about her work as attorney general of California in confronting crime along the border. During an August rally in Glendale, outside Phoenix, she talked about helping to prosecute drug- and people-smuggling gangs that operated transnationally and at the border.
“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said then.
The vice president’s trip to Douglas thrusts the issue of immigration into the brightest spotlight yet less than six weeks before Election Day.
Trump didn’t wait for her to arrive there before pushing back. He pointed Friday to purported data about criminals entering the U.S. illegally in a bid to link Harris to violent crimes committed by migrants. In a scathing diatribe, he said “blood is on her hands.”
“These are hard, tough, vicious criminals that are free to roam in our country,” Trump said at a manufacturing plant in Michigan.
Earlier in the week, he told voters that “when Kamala speaks about the border, her credibility is less than zero.”
The Trump campaign has also countered with its own TV ads deriding the vice president as a failed “border czar.”
“Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here,” said one spot. However, estimates on how many people have entered the country illegally since the start of the Biden administration in 2021 vary widely.
Harris also never held the position of border czar. Instead, her assignment was to tackle the “root causes” of migration from three Central American nations — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — that were responsible for a significant share of border crossers.
The vice president took a long-term approach to an immediate problem, helping persuade multinational corporations and Latin American businesses to invest in the region. That, she argued, would create jobs and give locals more reasons to stay home rather than take the arduous trek north.
Still, Trump has continued to decry an “invasion” of border crossers.
Douglas, where Harris appeared, is an overwhelmingly Democratic border town in GOP-dominated Cochise County, where the Republicans on the board of supervisors are facing criminal charges for refusing to certify the 2022 election results. Trump was in the area last month, using a remote stretch of border wall and a pile of steel beams to draw a contrast between himself and Harris on border security.
The town of 16,000 people has strong ties to its much larger neighbor, Agua Prieta, Mexico, and a busy port of entry that’s slated for a long-sought upgrade. Many locals are as concerned with making legal border crossings more efficient as they are with combatting illegal ones.
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Cooper reported from Phoenix.