Vice President Kamala Harris came into the presidential race with immigration and border security as top issues for voters, but struggled to gain momentum on the issue given her radical past policies as a California senator and her role in the Biden administration’s failure to control the crisis at the southern border.
The Fox News Voter Analysis found that 52% of voters said President-elect Donald Trump was the better candidate to handle immigration, while just 36% said Harris.
Meanwhile, it was one of the top issues for voters, with 20% saying it was the most important issue facing the country, behind only the economy and jobs (39%) and ahead of abortion (11%) and climate change (7%)
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Border Patrol picks up a group of asylum seekers from an aid camp at the US-Mexico border near Sasabe, Arizona, US, on Wednesday, March 13, 2024. (Justin Hamel/Getty Images)
The roots of Harris’ troubles on immigration began in 2021, when the Biden-Harris administration rolled back Trump-era policies including border wall construction and the Remain-in-Mexico policy and aimed to place a moratorium on deportations.
That was followed by a dramatic and historic surge at the border which overwhelmed Border Patrol agents and broke records for encounters, leading to chaos throughout the country as migrants poured in. The Biden administration said it was dealing with a “broken” system and congressional inaction, proposing a sweeping immigration bill that included a mass amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, but Republicans and others tied the surge to the policies of the administration,.
As those numbers took off, President Biden in March 2021 tasked Harris with leading diplomacy to countries south of the border to tackle what they saw as the root causes of migration — including climate change, violence and poverty. Crucially, it led her to be dubbed the “border czar” by critics and media outlets, although the White House rejected that moniker.
Despite the limits on that role, it made her a figurehead of the spiraling crisis, and she immediately faced pressure to visit the southern border. She visited Mexico and Guatemala but initially shrugged off calls to visit the border.
“You haven’t been to the border,” NBC’s Lester Holt told her, after she claimed she had been to the border.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris quipped.
The Washington Post will not endorse former President Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)
She eventually visited El Paso, Texas, but the controversy stuck, and Republicans would regularly mention the “border czar” when attacking the administration’s policies. Reports also emerged that she was dissatisfied with the assignment.
In that role, she would go on to raise more than $5.2 billion committed since May 2021 from over 50 companies and organizations to tackle root causes, but the ongoing crisis, which didn’t slow down until 2024, took the spotlight.
This year, she and the administration threw their weight behind a bipartisan border security bill that was introduced in the Senate in January. That bill, which failed to pick up enough support to pass the chamber, would have provided additional funding to the border, including for thousands of additional personnel.
It also included an emergency authority to allow officials to shut down entries at the southern border when they reach a certain level — but conservatives say it would solidify high levels of illegal immigration.
But Trump’s opposition to the bill allowed Harris to accuse Trump of torpedoing the bill for political purposes.
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Vice President Kamala Harris gestures as she delivers a concession speech for the 2024 presidential election, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, on the campus of Howard University in Washington. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough) ((AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
“Donald Trump learned about that bill and told them to kill it because he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she said. She also noted a recent drop in border crossings since June after President Biden signed a proclamation limiting asylum entries into the U.S.
“[Trump] can make up whatever lies he wants, but the fact is there’s only one candidate in this race who will fight for real solutions to help secure our nation’s border, and that’s Vice President Harris,” her campaign said.
As a presidential candidate, she also emphasized her past as an attorney general going after transnational criminal organizations “that smuggled guns, drugs, and human beings across the U.S.-Mexico border.”
But she was also hit by her past statements made during her time as a California senator and a presidential candidate in the 2020 election cycle. Her support for gender transition surgery to detained migrants hit headlines and was used as a weapon against her by Republicans.
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She would also move away from past statements in which she called for the decriminalization of illegal border crossings and for the closing of immigration detention centers. She had also mulled ICE starting again “from scratch.”
A Harris campaign adviser told Fox that her positions have been “shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris administration.”
Ultimately, though, it was not enough to help her overcome her deficit on the issue over Trump, who on Wednesday reiterated his calls to secure the border.
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He has pledged to resume wall construction and launch a mass deportation operation, while ending a number of Biden-era policies when he enters office in January 2025.