Kamala Harris She promised in her first campaign trip to the border with Mexico that if elected she would work with Republicans and independents to guarantee border security, as well as reform the “broken immigration system” of the United States.
The vice president and presidential candidate for the Democratic party arrived this Friday at the border community of Douglas, Arizona, to talk about migration, an issue on which voters favor his Republican rival Donald Trump, according to polls.
Looking ahead to the November 5 elections, Harris has the challenge of conquering those who believe that the Democratic administration alongside President Joe Biden has been lax in terms of border security, with record numbers of illegal crossings in recent months, as well as to those who question the government for not having fulfilled the promise of a more humane immigration reform.
“We have a duty to set the rules at our border and enforce them,” Harris said.
“We are also a nation of immigrants,” he added in an attempt to broaden his electoral base.
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“I challenge the false idea that suggests we must choose between securing our border or creating an immigration system that is safe, orderly and humane. We can and should have both,” Harris said.
The Democrat promised tougher penalties for those who cross the border illegally, but a legal alternative to guarantee citizenship to migrants who have been in USA for years irregularly.
All of this, Harris promised, in agreement with Republicans and independents, despite the fact that the issue is one of the most divisive in the country’s highly polarized political scene.
“Unacceptable”
Before his speech at a school in Douglas, Harris made an impromptu visit to the wall that snakes along much of the more than 3,000 kilometers of border between the United States and Mexico.
At the foot of the imposing fence, which Trump turned into a symbol of his electoral campaign, Harris spoke with border patrol officers, a group considered more favorable to the Republican vision.
“Border officers do not have enough resources,” he said in his speech.
The vice president said she will combat fentanyl traffickinga synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin and the leading cause of death among Americans between 18 and 49 years old, with more technology, more personnel and more resources.
Harris, 59, said that if elected she will once again promote a bill with which Democrats were trying to respond to pressure in the midst of the border crisis, and which was blocked in Congress by the Republican majority.
“Donald Trump sank it,” he said.
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“The flames of fear”
Trump has focused his campaign on an anti-immigration platform, promising mass deportations, falsely accusing immigrants of eating Americans’ pets and promoting negative rhetoric about immigrants, whom he accuses of “poisoning the blood” of the United States.
Trump “made the challenges at the border worse and continues to fan the flames of fear and division,” he said.
According to recent polls, Harris has reduced this advantage at a time when the number of illegal border crossings went from 250,000 in December to 58,000 in August, thanks to an executive action that Biden imposed in June to restrict access to the immigration system.
This Friday, Republican Representative Tony Gonzales released figures from the Department of Homeland Security according to which there are 425,000 foreigners without US citizenship and with criminal records in the country, including 13,000 convicted of homicide.
Trump immediately used the figures, stating, erroneously, that these would be migrants who crossed the border during the last three years, under the Biden-Harris administration.
“They’re walking our streets,” Trump said at a campaign event in Michigan.
The statistics, however, They do not detail how long these people have been in the United States.and according to experts, it could be decades.
“These are people who, mainly, have already been charged and convicted and have served their sentence,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, of the non-governmental American Immigration Council, told AFP.
Reichlin-Melnick said that during Trump’s presidency there were millions of noncitizen migrants living in the United States, including thousands with criminal records.
“The only reason they cannot be deported is because of diplomatic problems with their countries of origin, but it has nothing to do with the policies of the United States government, or its practices,” he said.
