By Trevor Hunnicutt
DOUGLAS, Arizona (Reuters) -Vice President Kamala Harris visited the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time in her 2024 presidential campaign on Friday as her Republican opponent Donald Trump doubles down on the message that immigrants pose a danger to America.
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 United States.
Harris will call for tighter asylum restrictions in a speech later on Friday, her campaign said, leaving an asylum ban established by President Joe Biden in place longer and lowering the threshold at which it is activated.
Some 7 million migrants have been arrested illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under Harris and Biden, according to government data, 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 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 in recent weeks, repeating falsehoods about legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio and suggesting immigrants were committing crimes and stealing jobs.
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. And the nation’s porous southern border remains a source of fentanyl, a leading cause of drug overdoses in the United States.
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 U.S. into “blighted refugee camps.”
A wide-ranging border security bill that took months to negotiate was blocked by the U.S. Senate in February, after Trump pressed Republicans to reject any compromise.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that 43% of voters favored Trump on the issue of immigration and 33% favored Harris, while 24% either didn’t know, chose someone else or refused to answer.
Harris was California’s attorney general before being elected to the U.S. 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.
Biden also tasked Harris with dealing with the root causes of migration from Central America, a diplomatic issue on which her record is mixed.
Emigration from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia to the United States has created unease among voters concerned about what the trend means for the U.S. economy, crime rates and culture. The share of American residents born abroad rose by nearly a fifth to 47.8 million from 2010 to 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; additional reporting by Steve Holland and Kristina Cooke; Editing by Heather Timmons, Miral Fahmy and Rosalba O’Brien)
