In recent years, no issue in U.S. politics has been more contentious than the situation at America’s southern border — and the temperature has only gone up since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden as the Democratic nominee. Here’s what Harris and Donald Trump have done so far about the border — and what they plan to do next.
Video Transcript
In recent years, no issue in us.
Politics has been more contentious than the situation at America’s southern border and the temperature has only gone up since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden as the Democratic nominee.
That’s because former President Donald Trump has seized on Harris’s involvement in the Biden administration’s border response to falsely claim that she is actually America’s border czar and she’s the worst border czar in the history of the world and therefore to blame for the situation as a whole.
Here’s what Harris and Trump have done so far about the border and what they plan to do next.
Trump has built his political identity around opposition to illegal immigration.
He implemented a lot of hard line immigration policies.
One of the most prominent being family separation.
Now, Trump supporters describe this as deterrence through strength and the numbers did show that there were fewer people trying to cross the border.
His critics however said it was deterrence through cruelty.
There are two parts to Harris’s history on immigration a that is sympathy, understanding as she would put it.
But also she’s a prosecutor.
So she has gone after people who break the law, whether they’re immigrants or not.
When Harris became Biden’s Vice president, her immigration policy was his, that’s largely the job of the vice president.
And on day one, he reversed a long list of Trump’s hard line immigration policies in the years that followed, there was a surge of migrants to the border and he named Harris as his point person to a the root causes of migration, leading a diplomatic mission to address issues like crime, economic hardship and try to reduce in the long term the amount of people coming to the United States to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek do not come.
This is where the idea that Harris is in charge of the entire US Mexico border has come from.
And it’s been a point of contention for years.
If Trump gets a second term, he has pledged to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in what he calls the largest mass deportation effort in US history.
He also aims to revive some COVID era title.
42 restrictions, suspend refugee resettlement, reinstate his remain in Mexico policy and end DACA Trump has even left the door open to resuming zero tolerance, family separations.
If Harris is elected in November, she has vowed to bring back the bipartisan border security bill that was hammered out by negotiators on both sides of the aisle in the Senate earlier this year.
And that Harris argues was torpedoed by Trump for his own political purposes.
Long term, Harris hopes to achieve more comprehensive immigration reform that would provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants who are in the United States.
But she also wants to pair that with border security.
But the realities of partisan politics on this issue mean that most of her impact will likely come through executive actions, not through legislation.