PHOENIX — Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to make a high-stakes campaign trip Friday to the Arizona border as the Democratic presidential nominee seeks to show voters in the battleground state and around the country that she's committed to solving a top issue that her opponent, Republican Donald Trump, has owned since taking the political stage.
Harris is expected to visit up to two border locations in southern Arizona, and possibly hold an event in Tucson.
Harris' trip will mark her second visit to the Southwest border in almost four years as vice president and her first as a presidential nominee.
Two months after taking office, President Joe Biden assigned Harris the task of dealing with the root causes of immigration in migrants' home countries. Her critics would dub Harris the "border czar."
Harris has had to live down a June 2021 interview with NBC's Lester Holt in which she claimed she had traveled to the Southwest border.
When Holt pushed back that she hadn't made the trip, Harris responded: "And I haven't been to Europe. And I don't understand the point that you're making."
Seventeen days later, Harris visited the Port of Entry in El Paso, Texas, her first border stop.
Immigration a top issue nationwide
Under Biden, the border has become a national issue.
The historic surge of migrants has been dispersed all over the country. Big cities like New York and Chicago have had to foot bills in the hundreds of millions of dollars for resettlement.
The border and immigration now rank among the top issues for voters in Arizona and nationwide.
Nationwide, voters' most important issues are inflation, threats to democracy and immigration/the border, according to an NBC News survey.
The economy, immigration and abortion rank as the top three issues for likely Arizona voters, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll earlier this month.
Trump held a five-point lead over Harris this week in the Times/Siena Arizona poll. The poll was done in the days after a planned assassination attempt against Trump in Florida.
In 2020, Biden defeated Trump in Arizona by just 10,500 votes - three-tenths of a percentage point. Biden was only the second Democrat to win the state in 72 years.
Early voting in Arizona starts Oct. 9, 12 days after Harris' visit.
Border apprehensions near 4-year low
Harris will survey a border where monthly migrant apprehensions are currently trending near the four-year-old lows of about 50,000 from Trump's term in office after soaring to a record high of 250,000 apprehensions last December.
A Biden Administration crackdown on asylum claims is credited with reversing the surge.
The Tucson sector that Harris will visit has been the busiest on the Southwest border, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The migrant encounters have jumped 40.3% during the first 11 months of the fiscal year. The sector accounts for one-third of all migrant encounters on the Southwest border
Democrats move to the right
Harris and fellow Democrats have responded to political and practical realities by moving to the right on immigration.
A Harris policy paper from 2019 pledged to use executive action to protect Dreamers from deportation and provide a path to citizenship. Now Harris appears to be waffling on that pledge.
According to Axios, the Harris campaign declined to say this week whether Harris would still take those executive actions.
During campaign speeches, Harris forcefully defends the bipartisan border security bill that was negotiated in Congress last spring but killed by GOP lawmakers under pressure from Trump. The legislation was one of the toughest border security bills in decades.
"She's going to talk about ... how you solve this problem. How do you fix the issue?" Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly told a CNN interviewer Tuesday.
"You hire more Border Patrol agents. You pay them more, so you get better retention. You build the infrastructure you need at the border. Fentanyl detection machines. Upgrade our ports of entry. Our ports of entry in Arizona are so important to our economy."
Trump plans historic deportation
Trump is promising the largest deportation effort in American history to remove millions of undocumented immigrants with the military's help. More recently, Trump has fired up crowds with promises to deport immigrants who are in the country legally.
The former president's attacks on legal and illegal immigrants have escalated in recent weeks after he spread a false story about cats and dogs being eaten by Haitian asylum seekers in Ohio.
Trump hasn't retracted the claims.
Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has defended the Haitians: “These people are here legally. They came to work. These are good people.”
Decision 2024
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