Top aides for Kamala Harris are considering sending the Vice President to visit the southern border invasion on Friday, according to two sources briefed on the plans who spoke to the New York Times. This comes as recent polling shows that former President Donald Trump is leading Harris significantly when it comes to immigration, which ranks among the top three issues for the 2024 campaign.
If Kamala were to visit the border, this would be her first trip there since she traveled to El Paso in 2021. At the time, she did not inspect the border wall during her visit. Since then, under the Biden-Harris administration, migration has skyrocketed at the southern border.
According to reports from Reuters, authorities have arrested approximately seven million migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border since President Biden took office. Additionally, nearly two million known gotaways have managed to evade the U.S. Border Patrol, according to data released by Republicans on the House Committee on Homeland Security in April. Estimates from Pew Research Center indicate that there are now 11 million undocumented migrants living in the United States as of 2022, though some critics argue these numbers may be much higher.
Former President Trump has pledged to remove the majority of undocumented migrants through mass deportation, a policy which has been shown to have significant support from American voters in an Ipsos poll conducted in September. The same survey found that Trump holds a ten-point advantage over Harris when it comes to who would do a better job handling immigration (44-34 percent.
The vast majority of voters do not support open borders, and many believe that Kamala holds an open border worldview. This was reflected in a July Harvard-Harris poll, which found that the establishment media has appeared to defend Harris’s history on immigration. For example, PolitFact claimed her designation as “border czar” was “mostly false,” while Axios reported on April 14, 2021, that she had been appointed by Biden as border czar to visit Mexico and Guatemala, but later stated she never actually held the title.
These events come as GovTrack removed its page ranking Kamala Harris as the “most liberal senator” in 2019, with Breitbart News reporting that she was ranked more far-left than even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT. The Vice President’s potential visit to the southern border would undoubtedly draw more attention to her stance on immigration and her role as “border czar.