US Vice President Kamala Harris visited the US-Mexico border for the first time in her US presidential campaign on Friday as her Republican opponent, former US president Donald Trump, doubles down on the message that immigrants pose a danger to the US.
Harris, a Democrat, arrived in Douglas, Arizona, a border town of less than 17,000 people, on Friday afternoon with a message ripped from Trump’s playbook, hoping to convince voters that she can curb the numbers of people illegally entering the US.
Her campaign said Harris would leave an asylum ban established by US President Joe Biden in place longer and lowering the threshold at which it is activated.
Photo: AFP
About 7 million migrants have been arrested illegally crossing the US-Mexico border under Harris and Biden, US government data showed, a record high number that has fueled criticism from Trump.
Those border crossings have dropped sharply since Biden announced the asylum ban earlier this year.
In Douglas, Harris spoke to US Customs and Border Protection officials and viewed part of a border barrier constructed between 2011 and 2012, the White House said.
Trump and his running mate JD Vance have increased their criticism of immigrants over the past few weeks, repeating falsehoods about legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
Immigration is a top issue for voters. Arizona is a closely contested election state, with a high population of Latino voters sought by both parties. The nation’s porous southern border remains a source of fentanyl, a leading cause of drug overdoses in the US.
On Friday, Trump blamed Harris for the rising trend of irregular migration.
“The architect of this destruction is Kamala Harris,” Trump said at Trump Tower. “She keeps talking about how she supposedly wants to fix the border. We would merely ask, why didn’t she do it four years ago? It’s a very simple question.”
He also accused Harris of turning small towns in the US into “blighted refugee camps.”
A wide-ranging border security bill that took months to negotiate was blocked by the US Senate in February, after Trump pressed Republicans to reject any compromise.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that 43 percent of voters favored Trump on the issue of immigration and 33 percent favored Harris, while 24 percent either did not know, chose someone else or refused to answer.
Harris was California’s attorney general before being elected to the US Senate and then vice president. Her California remit included targeting gangs that operate on both sides of the border and traffic in drugs, guns and people.
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