Kamala Harris visited the U.S. border with Mexico on Friday for her first time as the Democratic presidential nominee to fire back at critics of her record on migration.
The vice president toured a section of the wall in Douglas, Arizona, with Customs and Border Protection officers and discussed their efforts to combat trafficking.
Her visit comes on the same day staggering figures revealed there are 600,000 criminal migrants in the United States.
During her trip she is announcing that not only would she keep President Joe Biden’s sweeping asylum crackdown in place if she wins the White House, but that she would put even stronger measures into effect.
Harris toured the border wall with Border Patrol agents near Tucson, Arizona
She will make it harder to lift the emergency authority by requiring that the number of average border crossings achieve a further drop – below the current level of 1,500 – before the shutdown can be lifted.
Crossing came down after the Biden administration announced rules that barred migrants from being granted asylum when U.S. officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed.
In her remarks she will also attack Donald Trump for putting his political interests ahead of a public solution, repeating her criticism of him for lobbying his allies in Congress for killing a border security bill because he feared, if the legislation was successful, it would hurt his presidential campaign.
The goal of her visit is to tackle her politically vulnerable issue head on.
Trump and his fellow Republicans have pummelled Harris for months on border policy and the high number of migrant crossings.
It was her first visit to the border as a presidential candidate and her first since 2021
Now she will try to turn the tables and take control of the issue.
Trump pre-emptively attacked her visit on Thursday during a press conference in New York, when he questioned her decision to travel there.
‘Why would she go to the border now, playing right into the hand of her opponent?’ he asked.
‘She keeps talking about how she supposedly wants to fix the border. We would merely ask: Why didn’t she do it four years ago?,’ he said.
Harris visited a section of the 2,000-mile border in Douglas, Ariz., a key battleground state. She met with border agents and was briefed on the situation.
It was her first visit to the border as a presidential candidate, and her first since 2021 when President Joe Biden charged her with finding the root causes of migration.
Republicans have dubbed her the ‘border czar,’ a title her team disputes.