Immigration is a top election issue in the Trump vs. Harris race. Here's what they say
The 2024 battle between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris offers stark contrasts in their visions for the United States.
But when it comes to the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration issues, the gap between the two leading candidates is just taking shape. Harris became the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee this week after President Joe Biden dropped out, upending the race for the White House.
As Harris steps into the role of presumptive nominee, Trump has been eager to make her the face of the Biden administration’s immigration response.
“If she becomes president, Kamala Harris will make the invasion exponentially worse. And just like she did with San Francisco, just like she did with the border, our whole country will be permanently destroyed,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “I will seal the border, stop the invasion and keep America safe."
Despite Trump’s effort to paint Harris as a "radical-left person," the Biden administration has narrowed the gap between its immigration policies and Trump’s in recent years. Perhaps the biggest change, according to many observers, has been Biden’s rightward shift on immigration since campaigning four years ago on promises to pursue more humane policies than his predecessor.
“He was relentless in attacking Trump on immigration, criticizing his border policies, his asylum policies and everything,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies for the Washington-based, libertarian Cato Institute, told The Arizona Republic. “And this time, he's effectively said (Trump) he's right, and I'm cracking down harder than he did. And he's the reason that Congress isn't joining me in the crackdown.”
By the time he left office in January 2021, Trump had completely shut down asylum processing at the border under a public health rule known as Title 42. He created a program to keep asylum seekers in Mexico while their cases were adjudicated, and his administration negotiated safe-third country agreements with the Central American nations that were the largest source of migrants seeking protection in the United States.
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During his term, Biden repealed all three of those policies. But in June, he issued an executive order triggering a shutdown in asylum processing between border crossings in response to historic increases in arrivals at the border. In 2022 and 2023, encounters at the southern border exceeded 2 million for the first time on record.
Biden also fast-tracked deportations, even returning some Latin American migrants back to Mexico. And this month, his administration announced a plan to help Panama deport migrants attempting to cross the notorious Darien Gap on their way to the U.S.
Still, that hasn’t stopped Trump and Republicans from digging in on Biden, attacking him repeatedly over his border policies. Bier said Republicans successfully set the terms of that debate, keeping the Biden administration on defense.
“I think Biden would have been better served to set up a different standard from the start,” he said. “There was never any attempt to do that.”
At times, Trump’s attacks have drawn accusations of xenophobia, with the former president echoing nativist talking points and drawing broad strokes that paint migrants as criminals.
“We have to get a lot of these people out, and we have to get them out fast because they’re going to destroy our country,” Trump said on June 27 during the first presidential debate in Atlanta.
From Biden’s recent executive order to slash the number of migrant encounters at the southern border to Trump’s pledge to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” both campaigns have shifted their goals on immigration in the years since the 2020 election.
But the gap between campaign promises and government policy can be wide, especially when lawmakers remain gridlocked on the issue of immigration.
Here is where the major parties stand with less than four months before Election Day.
Where do Republicans stand on immigration?
Immigration has become a central plank of the GOP platform in recent years. The issue has inched up Republicans’ priority list as the party has evolved away from Tea Party-era fiscal conservatism and towards Trump’s “America First” image.
The party has largely taken cues from Trump on the issue. Republicans have widely adopted his 2016 calls to “build a wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border and broadly support some form of punishment for people who have entered the U.S. illegally.
During his nomination acceptance speech last week at Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump repeatedly linked migrants to crime, though available data shows immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.
Organizers handed out "Mass deportation now" signs, and attendees regularly chanted "Build the wall" or "send them back," as Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claimed they were the last line of defense against "catastrophic" illegal immigration.
"To keep our families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country," Trump said.
The GOP 2024 platform, which is intentionally shorter and less specific than previous years’, mentions immigration in several of the party’s 20 bulleted promises. That includes the top two bullet points: “SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION,” and “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”
The platform’s preamble laments “overrun” borders.
“We must secure our Southern Border by completing the Border Wall that President Trump started,” the document reads.
The platform also includes a promise to “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS,” a reference to protesters who have taken up the Palestinian cause against Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
It reflects what Bier expects will be a key 2024 campaign message from the GOP.
"The whole focus is going to be about how the last four years have been a lot of illegal immigration and Biden has failed to get it under control,” Bier said.
In practice, the GOP has called for tightening the standards needed for migrants to seek asylum in the U.S. and being harsher on people suspected of entering the country illegally. Republicans mostly support scaling down or ending the use of humanitarian “parole,” a tool that allows the president to admit people under a temporary or conditional status. Biden has leaned heavily on the program to help manage migrant flows along the U.S.-Mexico border.
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That has opened up another line of attack that Republicans have eagerly exploited during this campaign cycle. Trump and his party routinely highlight crimes committed by migrants paroled into the country to call for a greater immigration crackdown.
Most Republicans prefer Trump-era asylum procedures, such as the “Remain in Mexico” policy that required people to wait in Mexico while their cases are pending in U.S. courts. Trump vowed to reinstate some of those policies if elected.
The party roundly opposes offering amnesty for many people who previously crossed the border illegally and backs Trump’s calls for “mass deportations” should he be re-elected in 2024, though Biden’s deportation efforts so far have, by some measures, matched or exceeded Trump’s pace in his office.
Their endorsement of specific policies also has been subject to shifting political winds. Senate GOP leaders at first backed a bipartisan bill negotiated in the Senate that, if enacted, would have been the most sweeping law on the issue this century.
Among its key provisions, the bill would have allowed the federal government to shut down asylum processing during high levels of migration at the border. It would have also limited the release of migrants into the interior and reduced the length of time it takes to adjudicate asylum claims.
But the caucus backed away from the measure after Trump criticized it on social media in an effort to deny Biden an election-year legislative victory. In the end, some senators voted against the measure that they had been trying to rally support for just days before.
That became one of Biden’s key messages on the issue heading into the election, Bier said.
"Biden doesn't really have a response other than to blame Trump for blowing up the bipartisan immigration bill,” he said.
During the GOP presidential primary, several prominent candidates backed militarized approaches to the issue. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis campaigned on shooting suspected drug traffickers as they cross the border, leaving them “stone cold dead.” Multiple candidates endorsed the idea of using military force against drug cartels.
The use of highly charged language and fearmongering about immigration comes with risks, said Rosemary Nidiry, senior counsel for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law.
“It actually can lead to less reporting within immigrant communities about actual crimes that are happening to them. And then that actually leads to law enforcement not having the information necessary to keep us all safe,” Nidiry said.
Available data shows that overall crime rates around the U.S. continue falling since 2020, she said, and that immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than native-born residents.
“It's something that isn't new, but it's persistent,” she said. “And so that's why you can just counter it with actual data and research every time it comes up.”
Asked whether that undermines Trump's argument that immigration is driving crime, the RNC reiterated the charge that Biden is responsible for an "unsecured border."
"President Trump will restore his effective immigration policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shockwaves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history," Trump's national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, wrote in an email.
Where do Democrats stand on immigration?
Immigration at the southern border had been a weak spot for Biden, who struggled to combat Republican attacks on his handling of migrants entering the country even as he shifts his policies to the right.
Republicans are hoping to transfer that challenge to Harris, referring to her as Biden’s “border czar” this week, although Harris was never given that title. The vice president was tasked with working alongside Central American countries to address the root causes of immigration and was not responsible for migrant surges at the southern border.
Voters are still getting to know the new Harris campaign and the differences between the vice president and her predecessor on immigration. So far, Harris has embraced actions taken by Biden and his administration.
Harris supported some progressive immigration policies during her own presidential campaign four years ago, saying during a debate that she’d use executive action to reinstate DACA protections. A decade earlier, California Democrat had faced criticism for supporting a 2008 policy to report juvenile undocumented immigrants to federal authorities, regardless of if they had been found guilty of a crime.
More recently, the Biden administration sought to curtail the number of migrants entering the country, which has drawn criticism from some immigration experts. In June, Biden issued an executive order aimed at reducing the number of migrant encounters at the southern border. As a result, encounters dropped by 40% in the time after the order was implemented.
Biden promoted the policy on the campaign trail, saying at the recent presidential debate that the number of people coming across the border illegally is “better than when (Trump) left office.”
“What I’ve done — since I’ve changed the law, what’s happened? I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally. It’s better than when he left office. And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the — the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers,” Biden said.
The rightward shift on immigration and the border seemingly left Biden in a no-win position politically, even with members of his own party.
In addition to the relentless attacks from Trump and Republicans, Biden and his administration came under fire from more progressive Democrats as well as from Latino lawmakers who accused him of turning his back on his 2020 campaign promises.
“Rather than appeasing Republicans who continuously refuse to work on bipartisan legislation and block immigration solutions for political gain, I urge President Biden, instead, to use his authority to take concrete action to help fix our broken immigration system,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., said after Biden announced his executive order.
The Biden administration followed up three weeks later with new rules that make it easier for some 500,000 undocumented migrants who already qualify to obtain permanent residency status to apply without leaving the country. Biden’s executive order is aimed at helping certain noncitizens who have been married to a U.S. citizen for at least 10 years apply for that status and get a work permit while their application is processed.
As expected, that announcement earned Biden praise from Democrats and scorn from Republicans.
The Biden administration’s immigration stance contrast from when he and Harris were on the ballot four years ago. The Democratic National Committee included a lengthy immigration section in its 2020 party platform. The party promised to reverse the Trump administration’s policies denying entry to asylum seekers, and to provide a roadmap to citizenship to some of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants already living in the country.
The Biden campaign reiterated its criticism of Trump's immigration policies in a written statement before he stepped away from the race.
“The American people demand solutions to fix our broken immigration system, but at every step of the way, Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have made clear they only want chaos and partisan politics as usual. Every American should know that Trump proudly killed the strongest bipartisan border bill in a generation — siding with fentanyl traffickers over the Border Patrol and our security," spokesperson Kevin Munoz said.
“President Biden knows being president is not about theater — it’s about taking action on the issues our communities care most about. Despite Trump and his loyalists’ inaction, President Biden is taking action today," Munoz added.
There have been far more border encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden, according to an analysis by USAFacts, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit civic organization. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted migrant flows because of lockdowns and the implementation of Title 42. Those pandemic-era factors contributed to Trump having fewer encounters during his four years in office.
There were approximately 2.3 million border encounter actions from 2017 to 2019, while there were 3.2 million encounters in 2023 alone. Migrant encounters at the border include people deemed inadmissible at points of entry, those apprehended while illegally entering the United States in between border crossings, and people expelled to Mexico under Title 42.
Encounters have been trending downward over the last four months, according to data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Immigration is among the top issues for registered voters in the swing state of Arizona, according to a poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College in late April and early May. Immigration was tied with abortion rights as the second-most important issue to voters behind the economy and inflation.
Biden steered clear of putting specific immigration policy proposals in his campaign messaging, and it’s not yet clear whether Harris will do the same. Biden did not address immigration on the “issues” page of his campaign website, opting instead to address issues such as the economy and taxes, democracy, health care and abortion rights. The Harris campaign is so new that the vice president has not posted an “issues” page to her website.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Here’s where Trump and Harris stand on immigration policies
