Harris tries to get out early on immigration

Kamala Harris is going on a border offensive as she tries to tackle one of her biggest vulnerabilities — an issue the vice president and her campaign know they can’t ignore.

The Harris camp believes that by adopting a more active posture on the issue, it can take advantage of former President Donald Trump’s many vulnerabilities on immigration, including his role in killing a bipartisan Senate bill earlier this year and controversial policies he supported as president, such as family separation.

At an Atlanta rally on Tuesday, Harris tried to flip the issue of immigration on its head by taking a position unfamiliar to most Democrats in past cycles: bragging about her work on the border, both as state attorney general in California and as vice president. Her campaign launched a new immigration-focused ad on its social channels with this message: “Kamala Harris is fighting to fix our broken immigration system. Donald Trump is trying to stop her.”

The Harris campaign is planning more digital ads that will needle Trump on the issue and will use surrogate events to help elevate the vice president’s message, according to a campaign official, granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy. Arizona border-city mayors endorsed Harris earlier this week and will hold a press conference on Thursday ahead of Sen. JD Vance’s visit to the border to “highlight how Vance and Trump have failed local communities by killing the border security deal.”

The decision to take on immigration — a traditional liability for Democrats and particularly Harris — as a core part of her message on the trail marks one of the first strategic decisions from her campaign, as aides and allies rush to define their candidate on key issues before the Republican party does. It previewed an aggressive posture from Harris, as she counters a barrage of GOP attacks on the border.

Harris aides and allies believe changing conditions will aid her argument, which will focus on Trump’s role in killing the bipartisan border deal, as well as the controversial policies from his first term. Months after the collapse of the border talks, President Joe Biden issued an executive action clamping down on asylum between ports of entry. Illegal crossings are down 55 percent since the new policy was enacted in June, the lowest figures seen since the end of Trump’s administration.

“She wants every American to know that the Biden-Harris administration negotiated a bipartisan border bill with House Republicans, and it was ready to pass. And it was Donald Trump who blocked it,” said Matt Barreto, president of BSP Research, a polling firm that works with the Harris campaign. “That’s the truth, and she is going to tell that story.”

While notably absent from Harris’ public remarks in the first days of her presidential campaign, immigration was the first policy issue Harris tackled during Tuesday night’s speech, pointing to her record as an attorney general of a border state when she prosecuted transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers who came into the country illegally. And she touted the White House’s efforts to work with lawmakers earlier this year on a bipartisan border deal, only to have it squashed by Trump.

“Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk,” she said.

“He tanked the bipartisan deal because he thought it would help him win an election, which goes to show Donald Trump does not care about border security. He only cares about himself. And when I am president, I will actually work to solve the problem,” she continued, vowing to bring back the border security bill Trump killed and “sign it into law.”

Her decision to dig in speaks to how important the issue remains for voters this cycle — and one that has emerged as one of her top political liabilities. Immigration has polled as a top concern for voters this year, and recent polls show that more voters trust Trump to handle the issue than they do Harris.

White House and campaign aides for months worked to sharpen Biden’s messaging on immigration, operating on the belief that the scenes of chaos at the border could turn off independent and suburban voters. This thinking, in part, inspired the president’s crackdown on asylum in June and motivated congressional Democrats’ efforts to craft legislation.

To Harris’ benefit, it’s the first time Democrats in Washington have carried a consistent message on immigration. After the collapse of the bipartisan border legislation, Democrats embraced the issue, pulling a page from Rep. Tom Suozzi’s playbook after he won his February special election in New York by running on strengthening border security.

The lawmaker has talked with Harris aides since Biden endorsed her and passed along the message that she needs to hit the immigration issue hard — and now.

“That’s exactly what she needs to do. So I’m excited that she’s done it as early as she has,” Suozzi said in an interview. “It’s a top-of-mind issue, and you can’t ignore it. And the answer is to lean into it, and to say — what would you do? And she has said, she would’ve done the bipartisan deal.”

Complicating this issue for Harris is that Republicans have exaggerated her role working on migration in the Biden administration, slapping her with the misleading title of “border czar.” About six months into his term, Biden asked Harris to work with Central American countries to address the root causes of migration.

This work has made her one of Republicans’ favorite targets over the last few years, as the White House struggled with immigration staff turnover and widespread confusion over the administration’s policy and poor messaging. It wasn’t until this year that the Biden administration and Hill Democrats coalesced around a consistent message: They support border security and relief for long-term immigrants inside the U.S. trying to navigate a broken immigration system.

It remains to be seen whether her offensive will be enough to combat the onslaught. Trump and Republicans have zeroed in on immigration as the No. 1 issue now that they can’t hit Harris for age or fitness for office as they did with Biden. The former president’s campaign and allies are already pouring millions into ads blaming Harris for the border crisis.

Like Biden did in 2020, Harris took several progressive stances on immigration when she sought the Democratic nomination for the first time — from supporting undocumented immigrants’ eligibility for health care and saying that she wanted to decriminalize border crossings. Republicans are resurfacing these comments to portray Harris as a supporter of open borders, even as the vice president, like much of the Democratic Party, has shifted to the right on the issue.

“Kamala Harris’ deadly destruction of America’s borders is completely and totally disqualifying for her to be president. You can’t have a person like this as president,” Trump said during his rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, last weekend. “No person who deliberately releases these kinds of savage criminals to prey on our youth and our people ... not just youth, elderly people too ... should ever be trusted with power. Again, she has no clue, she has no clue, she’s evil.”

Outside immigration advocacy groups and campaign surrogates are also participating in the Harris effort to shift the narrative, circulating memos and talking points in recent days about Harris’ role in drafting the White House’s immigration policy and the resulting drop in border crossings.

Beyond border security, Harris is preparing to hit Trump on policies that remain unpopular with key swaths of the electorate — like mass deportations — while elevating the Biden administration’s moves to grant legal protections to long-term, undocumented spouses and children of American citizens. Aides and allies say it will give Harris an opportunity to ding Trump once again for his controversial family separation policy, like she did when he was in office.

“While Vice President Harris was a senator, she did hold the Trump administration accountable for child separations. She did press them on that,” Barreto said. “And I would expect that she will stand up for and promote both border security and the integration of long-term immigrants simultaneously.”