DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Vice President Kamala Harris is hoping 20 minutes at the border wall can solve nearly four years of border chaos.
Ms. Harris made a highly anticipated visit to the border in Arizona Friday, just her second trip as vice president and her first in more than three years, to proclaim she has a new get-tough approach on border jumpers — while also promising leniency to those who’ve already made it in.
The Democratic Party’s presidential candidate said she would go further than her current boss, President Biden, in tightening the rules for those attempting to sneak in by shutting down some of the asylum loopholes they use. And she promised more technology and manpower to try to sniff out fentanyl coming in vehicles through the legal border crossings.
“Our system must be orderly and secure, and that is my goal,” she said.
She also delivered a vicious critique of former President Donald Trump’s management of the border.
“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages and tried to end protections for Dreamers,” she said.
Ms. Harris said Mr. Trump didn’t add more Border Patrol agents or immigration judges, didn’t fix the asylum system and didn’t work with other governments to try to derail the flow of people.
“In the four years Donald Trump was president he did nothing to fix our broken immigration system,” she said.
In fact, Mr. Trump proposed adding 5,000 Border Patrol agents and still more deportation officers, but Congress never funded the request.
He also proposed new asylum restrictions but immigrant-rights activists sued to block those changes in the courts. And the former president did sign agreements with other countries to head off bogus asylum claims but the Biden administration canceled those once it took office.
On a press call arranged by the Trump campaign, Ms. Harris was blasted by the mothers of Americans who have died as a result of the influx of drugs over the border and those who have been killed by illegal immigrants.
“I don’t know how many more people Kamala Harris thinks have to die before she will say something like yes, we have a problem,” said Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was slain in Maryland last year.
Anne Fundner, mother of a boy who died of a fentanyl overdose, said Ms. Harris has shown “complacency” on the border.
“A photo op won’t bring our kids back,” she said.
The border trip was the first stop on a West Coast trip of intense campaigning that included two high-dollar celebrity-filled fundraisers in California and a campaign rally in Las Vegas.
“This race is as close as it could possibly be,” Ms. Harris said Saturday at a private fundraiser in San Francisco. “This is a margin-of-error race.”
The event was held at the San Francisco Palace of the Arts, and donors paid anywhere from $500 for a ticket to as much as $250,000 for a pair of tickets and a photo op with Ms. Harris.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, spoke at the event while singer Andra Day treated the crowd to a performance of her hit, “Rise Up.”
In Los Angeles, tickets also cost $500, but donors could pay as much as $1 million for four tickets to a private reception with Ms. Harris, lunch and a photo. Actress Halle Bailey and singer Alanis Morissette performed at the fundraiser.
Ms. Harris did not reprise her new tough border rhetoric at the fundraisers, instead focusing on abortion rights and telling donors why they should fear a second Trump presidency.
“Donald Trump has a different plan and in many ways, he is an unserious man. He’s an unserious man, however, the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious,” she said.
She is scheduled to close out her West Coast swing Monday in Nevada with an event focused on small businesses.
Her border trip highlighted the tricky balancing act she is attempting.
She wants to reclaim some ground with a public fed up with the border chaos, even as she tries to placate her own left wing that has cheered the surge of migrants.
Her political history puts her far closer to those left wingers. She has compared deportation officers to the Ku Klux Klan and Border Patrol agents to slave masters, and has cheered on calls to decriminalize illegal immigration and curtail deportations.
That, however, is not what voters are looking for right now.
The good news for Democrats is that numbers at the border have improved since December, which was by far the worst month on record. Border Patrol agents that month made nearly 250,000 apprehensions at the southern border. In August the number was below 60,000.
But unauthorized migrants are still streaming in through the administration’s “parole” programs, which bypass the usual immigration system and allow in people who have no legal right to enter. Homeland Security has carved out slots for more than 70,000 people per month to be paroled.
All told, Customs and Border Protection tallied nearly 159,000 encounters with unauthorized migrants in August, and based on trends a majority were likely caught and released.
In late 2020, the last months under Mr. Trump, illegal immigrant encounters at the border totaled about 90,000 a month and officials at the time said few were caught and released.
More than 5 million illegal immigrants who arrived since 2021 have also settled in the U.S., straining local resources and committing high-profile crimes.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed last week that a Venezuelan migrant paroled into the U.S. by the Biden administration in October 2022 has already tallied four arrests in Fairfax County,
Yohandri Roger Mosquera-Rosas’s rap sheet included charges of malicious wounding, reckless endangerment of a child, two DUI and hit-and-run cases and multiple gun-related charges.
Fairfax County’s sheriff’s department, under its sanctuary policy declined three detainer requests from ICE officers seeking to get Mosquera-Rosas off the streets.
Ms. Harris spent roughly 20 minutes along the border wall on Friday. The section she toured was built in the Obama administration to carry out the Secure Fence Act, signed by President George W. Bush.
The U.S.-facing side of the wall is filled with razor wire — something the Biden administration has criticized when it was Texas stringing miles of it along that state’s border.
Ms. Harris on Friday renewed her promise to pursue a border bill written by senators earlier this year that would have made some changes to asylum claims and created a border expulsion authority similar to the Title 42 power instituted by Mr. Trump during the pandemic in 2020.
“Donald Trump tanked it,” Ms. Harris said. “He picked up the phone, called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill.”
In reality, the bill was dead well before Mr. Trump opposed it.
House Republicans had made clear it wouldn’t clear their chamber and it couldn’t even clear a majority, much less overcome a filibuster in the Senate, after some Democrats joined Republicans in opposing it.
— Stephen Dinan reported from Washington, D.C.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.