Nicholas Nehamas, Jazmine Ulloa and Shane Goldmacher
LAS VEGAS — For weeks, Republicans have pummeled Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration, blaming her for President Joe Biden’s policies at the border.
Now, Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, is seeking to neutralize that line of attack, one of her biggest weaknesses with voters, running a playbook that Democrats say has worked for them in recent elections and staking out her clearest position yet as a tough-on-crime prosecutor focused on securing the border.
This week, she has hit back by promising to heighten border security if elected and slamming her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, for helping kill a bipartisan border deal in Congress. And her campaign has walked back some of the more progressive positions she took during her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, including her stance that migrants crossing the U.S. border without authorization should not face criminal penalties.
“I was attorney general of a border state,” Harris, who was once California’s top prosecutor, said Friday at a rally in Arizona, a swing state where immigration is a top concern for voters. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”
A day earlier, the Harris campaign released a television advertisement highlighting her pivot. The ad, targeted to voters in the battleground states, promised that Harris would “hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” It made no mention of immigrants already in the United States illegally — a top priority for many progressives and immigration activists — although in her Arizona speech Harris stressed the importance of “comprehensive reform” that includes “an earned pathway to citizenship.”
No other Democratic nominee has taken a position this tough on border security since Bill Clinton. Her stance reflects a change in public opinion since Trump left the White House in 2021. More Americans, including many Democrats and Latino voters, have expressed support for hard-line immigration measures.
The shift in public opinion comes as Republicans have escalated their rhetoric against migrants. Border crossings skyrocketed during the Biden administration, though more recently they have sharply declined since a Biden executive order designed to clamp down on the border. The question for Harris is whether her new message as the party’s standard-bearer will come too late for voters who have already formed opinions of her record.
Senior Trump campaign officials have ranked immigration as among Harris’ deepest vulnerabilities and sought to pin responsibility for the Biden administration’s policies on her, calling her the “border czar.” The title far exceeds the actual policy portfolio given to her by Biden, who asked her to address the root causes of migration from Latin America.
Democratic polling has raised similar concerns about Harris’ immigration record. Blueprint, a Democratic group, recently tested six potential Republican lines of attack on Harris — including labeling her the “border czar” — and found that those involving immigration were the most effective, even more so than attacks related to the economy and inflation.
Other polls have shown that voters place more trust in Trump’s ability to handle border issues than in Harris’. But if Harris can at least counter Republican arguments on immigration, she may be able to sway voters on issues more friendly to Democrats, such as abortion, her allies say.
The decision for the Harris campaign to frame her record as California attorney general as a “border-state prosecutor” stands in contrast to how she ran in the 2020 Democratic primary.
Then, during a debate, she raised her hand in response to a question about whether people who are here illegally should be eligible for public health care.
For his part, Trump has attacked Harris over the border in dark terms, engaging in fearmongering about migrants and using dehumanizing language to falsely paint them as a threat to Americans.
“Every day, Kamala is letting migrant criminals roam free to assault, rape, mutilate and kill our citizens,” the former president said at a rally in Montana on Friday.
Chris DeRose, a Republican who served as a clerk of courts in Arizona’s Maricopa County, said many swing voters would be dubious of Harris’ rhetoric.
“She’s part of the Biden-Harris administration,” DeRose said. “There’s going to be some skepticism.”
But Harris and her allies have tried to make Trump’s immigration record into its own campaign issue. This year, Trump successfully convinced Senate Republicans to kill a bill supported by Biden and Harris that would have effectively mandated that the border be shut down to migrants when numbers reached certain levels and that vastly expanded detentions and deportations.
“Donald Trump tanked the deal,” Harris said in Arizona as a crowd of more than 15,000 supporters booed. “Because he thought by doing that it would help him win an election.”
Jen Cox, a senior adviser for the Harris campaign in Arizona, said Democrats in that state, including Sen. Mark Kelly, had won elections with tougher messages on immigration.
“Voters want to see folks be serious about actually fixing the broken immigration system and securing the border,” Cox said in an interview. “They don’t want to see folks play politics with it.”
In a closely watched special election in New York this year, Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, won a competitive House race after slamming Trump over the scuttled border deal and taking unusually hard-line stances for a member of his party, including calls to temporarily shut down the border and deport migrants who assault police.
“The most effective politician is the one that says what the people are thinking already,” Suozzi said. “And people are talking about this issue. They are very much concerned about it. And the vice president can continue to emphasize that, yes, we recognize this is a problem and we are willing to compromise to solve the problem, unlike the other side.”
Harris campaign aides say her move to the center since the 2020 primary had been shaped by her time as vice president.
Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican consultant focused on Latino voters, said Harris’ pledge to sign the border security bill, which did not include protections for immigrants already in the United States, and the security-focused message of her new television ad reflected wider changes among Democrats.
Since the Obama years, Democrats had sought to fuse efforts to increase border security with calls to establish permanent paths to legal residency and citizenship for the roughly 10 million immigrants without legal status in the United States — many of whom have lived in the country for years, holding jobs, paying taxes and starting families.
But the Latino electorate, the fastest-growing slice of the voter bloc, now tends to be third- and fourth-generation voters more removed from the immigration experience, Madrid said.
“This doesn’t mean you have to go all Donald Trump on immigration,” he said. “It means you have to lead with border security and then weave in the elements of immigration reform later.”
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