Harris attempts to tone down Trump’s harshest critics with border visit

Vice President Kamala Harris sought to turn the tide on border security, the most important issue facing Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election, by promising Friday to take a tougher line on the towards those who cross the border illegally and accusing the former president of deliberately sabotaging legislation that helped solve the problem.

“This is the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades. And it should be in effect today,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a 24-minute speech near a port of entry in southern Arizona. “But Donald Trump failed…. He prefers to tackle a problem rather than solve it.

Harris said she would continue President Joe Biden’s new policy that dramatically reduced illegal border crossings by ending asylum claims for those who did not enter the country through an authorized port of entry once that these crossings will have exceeded 2,500 per day for seven consecutive days. And she said she would increase criminal penalties against repeat offenders.

“I believe we have a duty to establish rules at our border and enforce them,” she said.

Harris was introduced by a mother who lost a son to a fentanyl overdose, and she spent several minutes discussing the “scourge” of the drug’s effects on Americans. She reminded her audience that as California’s two-term attorney general, she prosecuted Mexican smuggling gangs.

“I walked through tunnels that traffickers used to smuggle contraband into the United States,” she said. “I have seen tunnels with walls as smooth as those in our living room, equipped with lighting and air conditioning, which makes it very clear that this is a company that makes a lot of money in traffic “guns, drugs and human beings.”

Harris also criticized Trump for making no effort to reform the immigration system during his four years in office, and she said she would make it a priority, particularly to provide a pathway to citizenship to those who were brought to the country illegally as children.

Biden, before ending his re-election campaign, was far behind Trump on the issue of illegal immigration, but Harris has managed to narrow that gap somewhat in recent polls. She aggressively blamed Trump for defeating the measure that would have added 1,500 more Border Patrol agents and paid for 100 new devices to detect fentanyl at ports of entry, where the vast majority of the product enters the country.

That Trump persuaded his Republican allies to stop the legislation earlier this year is not in dispute.

Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the lead Republican negotiator on the bill, supported it, saying his party was getting much of what it wanted on border security. He told Fox News that Trump personally pressured his colleagues to reject the bill in an effort to help his campaign win back the White House.

“Trump said don’t fix anything during the presidential election. This is the biggest problem, don’t fix it. We will resolve the issue next year,” Lankford said.

And Trump himself acknowledged at the time that he didn’t want the bill to pass. “Please blame me. Please,” he said at a January 27 rally.

Since Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee after Biden withdrew in July, Trump has accused her of failing to solve the problem of illegal immigration, despite being “the border czar.”

“She’s done the worst job, probably in the history of any border, not just our border,” he told reporters Thursday in an attempt to refute Harris’ Arizona visit in advance. .

Harris correctly noted, however, that his mission was to find and address the root causes of migration flows from Latin America to the United States, not to “secure” the border.

Harris has proven since becoming Trump’s opponent that he is a more effective communicator than Biden. During her September 10 presidential debate with Trump, for example, she responded to a question about immigration by addressing Trump entirely, accusing him of blocking the border bill just to keep it alive as a campaign subject.

She then tangentially noted that attendees of Trump’s rally had left his events before he finished speaking, earning an angry response that morphed into his now-infamous lies that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets in Ohio.

The former coup leader, who is now also a convicted felon awaiting sentencing, made illegal immigration a cornerstone of his 2016 presidential campaign and repeatedly promised he would force Mexico to pay for a huge reinforced concrete border wall.

However, upon his election, Trump made no effort to convince Mexico to pay and ultimately plundered the money intended for housing and schools for service members and their families to build the promised wall, which had by then transformed into a slightly taller version of the steel border. barrier that was initiated by President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama.

By the time Trump left office, only 52 miles of new fencing had been built where there had previously been no barriers along the 1,954-mile border. An additional 400 miles of 18- to 30-foot steel fencing were constructed to replace the old fencing.