Kamala Harris can’t repair her immigration record By Emily Jashinsky
https://unherd.com/newsroom/kamala-harris-cant-repair-her-immigration-record/
There’s not much Kamala Harris can do to negate the electoral consequences of this administration’s border policy except to keep quiet about it. Her campaign, though, appears to be doing the opposite. She’s leaning in.
As if to illustrate the point, the VP got doused with a metaphorical bucket of cold water on Friday afternoon just hours before she planned to deliver remarks from the border town of Douglas, Arizona. Republican Rep. Tony Gonzalez posted a letter he received this week from Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealing nearly half a million noncitizen convicted criminals are in the country, some of them outside of detention.
“As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket, which includes those detained by ICE, and on the agency’s non-detained docket,” an agency official wrote. “Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges.”
Fox News broke down the data by category, noting: “Those include 62,231 convicted of assault, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 56,533 with drug convictions and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 2,521 have kidnapping convictions and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions. There are an additional 1,845 with pending homicide charges, 42,915 with assault charges, 3,266 with burglary charges and 4,250 with assault charges.”
These are eye-watering numbers. While they’re not broken down by year, consider this summary of the border numbers under the current administration from Left-leaning Vox: “For most of the decade before [Biden] took office, US Customs and Border Protection had in the range of 300,000 to 500,000 ‘encounters’ with migrants at the southern border each year. Under Biden, the average number has been about 2 million a year, with last year being the highest yet.”
Those numbers do not include “known gotaways,” let along unknown gotaways who are not even noticed by law enforcement. It’s hardly surprising that even amid the pet-eating frenzy of the last few weeks, a new swing-state poll found Trump leads Harris by double digits on immigration: 56% to 44%.
Harris’s campaign, though, is hoping to eat away at these margins by tackling the issue head-on. In addition to her border trip, she has announced a new ad styling her as “a leader with a real plan to fix the border.” According to her campaign, the spot will run in Arizona and “other battleground states.”
Whether this reflects media-driven overconfidence or desperation, it’s a blunder. Harris going to Douglas is the equivalent of Donald Trump going to an anti-abortion rally. The more she talks about this issue, the more she’s nudging voters to remember the crisis at the border — and that crisis is inextricably linked to the administration she’s a part of at this very moment.
When pressed on what happened, Harris falls back on a woefully insufficient (and untrue) story about Trump killing a bipartisan bill that would have restricted border crossing. Journalists don’t question this narrative, and it’s all well and good to debate the bill in and of itself. But it was only even proposed this year. Voters remember the dovish rhetoric from both Biden and Harris throughout the Trump administration. They understand the basic point.
Right now, the more people think about abortion, the worse it is for Republicans, and the more people think about immigration, the worse it is for Democrats. The theatre in Douglas may be well executed, but the stunt is poorly conce
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