Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to call for tougher border security measures on Friday during a visit to the southern border, a trip that amounts to her latest attempt to directly confront some of her biggest political vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n
In what her campaign is billing as a major speech in Douglas, Ariz., Harris is planning to emphasize her support for a bipartisan border security bill and decry Republican nominee Donald Trump\u2019s central role in derailing it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,\u201d she plans to say, according to an excerpt released by her campaign.<\/p>\n
Her campaign is also releasing an ad that will air in Arizona and other battleground states. \u201cShe will secure our border,\u201d the narrator states. \u201cWe need a real leader with a real plan to fix the border. And that\u2019s Kamala Harris.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris\u2019s decision to visit the border, as Trump attacks her forcefully on immigration and polls show voters trust him more on the issue, marks a stark effort to address a political vulnerability head-on. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), regularly criticize Democrats as being insufficiently tough on immigration, and President Joe Biden has suffered politically from scenes of chaos at the border, although crossings have fallen in recent months.<\/p>\n
During her trip Friday, Harris plans to say forcefully that America needs to enforce its laws on the border, according to a campaign official. She will also recount her record as California attorney general, saying she prosecuted transnational gangs and criminal organizations that smuggled drugs or trafficked humans and guns across the border.<\/p>\n
She will also visit Border Patrol agents and argue that they need more resources, and will promise that combating the flow of fentanyl across the board will be \u201ca top priority\u201d of her presidency. As part of that effort, she will propose adding new fentanyl-detection machines at ports of entry at the border and will press the Chinese government to do more to crack down on companies that make chemicals used in fentanyl.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do have a broken immigration system. And it needs to be fixed,\u201d the vice president said during an interview Wednesday with MSNBC. She cited the bipartisan border bill, which would have significantly increased the number of border agents.<\/p>\n
\u201cDonald Trump got word of the bill, realized it was going to fix a problem he wanted to run on, and told them to kill the bill, don\u2019t put it up for a vote,\u201d Harris said. \u201cHe killed a bill that would have actually been a solution, because he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said that if she is elected, she would bring that legislation back and attempt to pass it. In a reflection of the sharp shift in the political landscape since Biden took office, Harris focused almost entirely on securing the border, nodding only briefly to the longtime Democratic aim of providing a way for undocumented immigrants already in the country to become citizens.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need a comprehensive plan that includes what we need to do to fortify not only our border, but deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to earn citizenship,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Trump has routinely unleashed harsh rhetoric against the influx of immigrants, suggesting it is poisoning the American way of life. At a campaign rally Monday in Pennsylvania, Trump referred to the immigrant population in Springfield, Ohio, saying, \u201cYou have to get them the hell out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump and Vance have previously \u2014 and falsely \u2014 claimed that immigrants in the town have been stealing and eating their neighbors\u2019 pets.<\/p>\n
Early in the Biden administration, Harris was tasked with leading diplomatic efforts to tackle the \u201croot causes\u201d of immigration by improving conditions in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Although her mandate did not involve current border crossings, Republicans began referring to her as the \u201cborder czar\u201d and sought to link her to the problems at the border.<\/p>\n
Harris also made a trip to the border in June 2021, traveling to El Paso for a 4\u00bd-hour visit to tour operations.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to call for tougher border security measures on Friday during a visit to the southern border, a trip that amounts to her latest attempt to directly confront some of her biggest political vulnerabilities. In what her campaign is billing as a major speech in Douglas, Ariz., Harris is planning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10246,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}