Amid continued polling that shows Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump virtually tied in the national race for the White House, the Democratic nominee is planning to visit the U.S.-Mexico border while on a visit to Arizona on Friday.
The visit is set to be her very first trip to the southern border since President Biden dropped out of the race. Details of the visit, including where exactly she'll be and what else she might do on her stay, are still being sorted, according to CNN.
Her visit is expected to focus on border security, one of the central issues to voters this cycle, and she may give remarks about border control, two people briefed on the preparations told The New York Times, who insisted on anonymity to discuss a trip that has not yet been made public.
Friday's visit to Arizona is set to come at a time when border crossings are the lowest they've been since 2020. In August, Border Patrol recorded about 58,000 encounters between ports of entry along the U.S. southern border, slightly up from July but far below the record numbers in recent months.
"The data published today by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that since President Biden announced new, decisive executive actions to secure the border on June 4, encounters between ports of entry have dropped significantly and remain at their lowest level in years— July and August saw the lowest encounter levels since September 2020," White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez said in a statement.
The administration, Fernandez Hernandez said, "has taken effective action, and Republican officials continue to do nothing."
It also comes amid new polls that show Trump opening his gap in the critical battleground state.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed the former President is currently standing at 50%, compared to 45% in the border state. That is a clear contrast between her figures in August, when the New York Times last conducted the same poll in the state. At the time, the Vice President showed a lead of five percentage points.
Latinos in Arizona seem to be one of the driving forces on this change, as they appear to have moved away from the Vice President. In fact, a significant figure of Latino voters in the state, 10%, say they are undecided, a move that benefits Trump.
Harris' number in the Grand Canyon State may be troubling for her campaign, particularly since that territory is also home to one of the most important Senate races that is expected to decide the control of the Senate, and it has a highly popular Democratic candidate. In that race, Rep. Ruben Gallego is comfortably ahead of his opponent, Kari Lake, at 49% to 43%.
Immigration, along with the economy, are among the top issues that Harris has struggled to convince voters she can handle. In the NYT poll, of three Sun Belt states, including Arizona, 54% of likely voters said they trusted Trump more on immigration, compared with 43% for the vice president.
She has tried to sway voters who are skeptical about her plans on immigration by saying that she believes both in securing the border and in providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. And she has highlighted her role in pursuing transnational criminal groups during her time as attorney general of California.
The Democrat has also promised to bring back the failed bipartisan border bill that was stopped by Republicans in Congress. The bill would have essentially shut down the southern border, increasing funding to invest on different strategies such as increasing training for border patrol officers and bringing new technology.
"I refuse to play politics with our security," Harris said during her speech accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention this summer, in which she also pledged to "bring back the bipartisan border security bill that [Trump] killed and sign it into law."
But that hasn't stopped the GOP from attacking her on the issue, falsely dubbing her as "border czar," casting her as solely responsible for the management of the U.S.-Mexico border, despite not being previously involved in border control policies during her time as Vice President.
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