The Stakes: What Harris and Trump have done about the border — and what they want to do next

The latest entry in an ongoing series about where the 2024 presidential candidates stand on issues of major importance to voters. Previously: Where Trump and Harris stand on abortion.

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.

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 therefore to blame for the situation as a whole.

After Biden and Harris took office in 2021 and reversed some of Trump’s hard-line restrictions, illegal crossings surged to a record high of more than 2 million per year, on average.

Democrats and other defenders of the administration’s record say that the causes, including foreign violence, economic hardship and cartels that profit from crossings, are complicated and predate Biden’s presidency. Republicans and other critics argue that the White House has effectively encouraged migrants to try their luck by using immigration parole at a historic scale and ordering a pause on most Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations.

Harris in particular has come under fire from the right for taking a long time to visit the border as vice president — and for saying she had visited before she actually did. Yet since launching her presidential bid, Harris has gone on offense, accusing Trump of undermining a recent bipartisan effort to increase border security so he could keep running on the issue.

On Friday, Harris traveled to the southern border for the first time since June 2021 amid steep declines in the number of crossings and asylum seekers — and continued to hammer Trump while she was there.

"The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games," she said. "And so even though Donald Trump tried to sabotage the border security bill, it is my pledge that as president, I will bring it back up and proudly sign into law."

So how could the differences between Harris and Trump reshape U.S. border policy?

The election in November will be the first in U.S. history to feature a former president competing against the current vice president. As a result, this year’s candidates already have extensive White House records to compare and contrast.

Here’s what Harris and Trump have done so far about the border — and what they plan to do next.

Where they’re coming from

Where Trump is coming from: More than anything else, Trump built his political following on a hard-line approach to immigration.

Starting in 2011, Trump boosted his profile on the right by positioning himself as the leading proponent of the false conspiracy theory that then-President Barack Obama — whose father was from Kenya — wasn’t born in Hawaii as stated on his birth certificate. In 2016, Trump finally admitted that so-called birthers (those who believe Obama isn’t a native-born citizen) were wrong and that “??Obama was born in the United States.”

The previous year, Trump infamously launched his first presidential campaign by claiming that most Mexican immigrants are “people [who] have lots of problems. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” (In fact, immigrants commit significantly less crime than native-born Americans.)

Trump spent much of 2016 vowing to build a physical wall along the border between the U.S. and Mexico — possibly fortified with spikes, electricity and an alligator moat — and make Mexico pay for it.

According to the New York Times, “the idea [of a border wall] was initially suggested by a Trump campaign aide … as a memory aid to prompt the candidate to remember to talk about immigration in his speeches. But it soon became a rallying cry at his events.”

“You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving,” Trump told the Times editorial board, “I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ And they go nuts.”

Mexican immigrants weren’t the only ones in Trump’s crosshairs. In late 2015, after domestic terrorists Syed Rizwan Farook (a U.S. citizen born in Chicago) and his wife, Tashfeen Malik (a native of Pakistan who’d lived in the U.S. for years), killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Around the same time, Trump said he would create a “deportation force” that would expel millions of unauthorized immigrants. “We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally,” he claimed during one primary debate. “They will go out.”

Where Harris is coming from: Both of Harris’s parents — her Jamaican father and Indian mother — were immigrants; she has often expressed sympathy with immigrant communities because of her background.

But Harris also entered politics as a prosecutor, and she has long shown a willingness to crack down on immigrants who break the law. Her time as attorney general — first in San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, then statewide in California from 2011 to 2016 — exemplifies this dual approach.

On the one hand, immigrant rights were front and center for Harris. She favored specialized visas for undocumented victims of violent crimes; denounced proposed federal legislation that would have made it illegal to help an undocumented immigrant; and secured tens of millions of dollars to hire lawyers for unaccompanied children who began arriving at the border in 2014.

And when an unlicensed construction contractor cheated temporary workers out of their wages, Harris charged him with four felony counts for grand theft. She went on to encourage other undocumented day laborers to report similar abuses.

"The law applies equally to all," Harris said. "If any one of us is a victim of crime, let's be clear, the person who commits the crime will be punished, regardless of the status of the victim."

At the same time, Harris did not shy away from applying the same standard of accountability to immigrants themselves. Despite the fact that San Francisco had passed a sanctuary ordinance that limited cooperation with federal authorities, she pushed for juvenile immigrants who’d been arrested for crimes such as dealing drugs to be turned over to immigration agents for deportation.

“We are a sanctuary city, a city of refuge, and we always will be,” Harris said in a statement. Yet, she added, the original sanctuary law “was never intended to shield anyone from being held accountable for a crime.”

Likewise, Harris made it a priority as California AG to tackle cross-border crime, going “after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally,” as she put it at a recent rally in Atlanta. “I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”

What they’ve done in office

What Trump did in office: During his four years in office, Trump issued more than 400 executive actions on immigration.

The changes started almost immediately. On Jan. 27, 2017, Trump signed an order seeking to block travelers from seven majority Muslim countries for 90 days while suspending refugee resettlement and prohibiting Syrian refugees indefinitely. Challenged in court, the administration revised its travel bans as time went on, removing or adding certain countries.

Trump quickly zeroed in on his signature border wall as well. But Congress refused to meet his funding demands, sparking a lengthy government shutdown. Ultimately, Trump managed to build just 458 miles of barrier along the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border — nearly all of it in areas where older barriers already stood.

Mexico did not pay for any of Trump’s border wall.

Frustrated with the continued crush of illegal border crossings, Trump green-lit a plan in 2018 to forcibly separate migrant children from their parents or caregivers at the border and then criminally prosecute the adults. Trump eventually ended his “family separation” policy — but only after images of crying, traumatized kids detained in crowded facilities sparked a national outcry.

Despite Trump’s vow to expel “millions” of immigrants, deportations by ICE officers — who were given broad latitude to go after anyone without legal status — averaged just 80,000 per year during his presidency (significantly lower than the annual rate under Obama).

Why? Trump supporters and critics largely agree that the former president’s strict policies — including narrowing who is eligible for asylum; making it more difficult to qualify for permanent residency or citizenship; rolling back the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program; and forcing Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are processed — “deterred” some migrants from even trying to cross the border.

But while Trump’s supporters described this as deterrence through strength, Trump’s critics called it deterrence through cruelty.

In March 2020, Trump implemented the emergency health authority known as Title 42, which allowed border officials to rapidly turn away asylum seekers on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19 — without giving them a chance to appeal for U.S. protection.

What Harris has done in office: Harris became a senator at the start of Trump’s presidency. Her approach to immigration at the federal level was at first defined in opposition to his. While on Capitol Hill, Harris condemned Trump’s “Muslim ban” and interrogated Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen about the president’s family separation policy. After visiting a detention facility near San Diego in June 2018, Harris became the first senator to demand Nielsen’s resignation.

“This is outrageous,” Harris said. “This is clearly a crime against humanity that is being committed by the United States government and we have to stop it.”

Harris announced her 2020 presidential candidacy in January 2019. During the primary campaign, she promised to close private immigration detention centers and limit deportations. She also proposed using executive orders to overcome the legal barriers that prevent as many as 2.1 million Dreamers — undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children — from obtaining green cards and ultimately earning citizenship.

As vice president, Harris’s job was to help the administration follow through on its promise to reverse Trump’s immigration policies on “day one.” In early 2021, Biden halted construction of the border wall; ended his predecessor’s travel bans; created a task force to reunify migrant families separated under Trump; reinstated DACA; ended Title 42 expulsions for unaccompanied minors; and ordered a pause on most ICE arrests and deportations, issuing new guidelines directing officers to prioritize national security threats, serious criminals and recent border crossers.

At the same time, Biden warned that without more funding and stronger “guardrails,” such as additional asylum judges, the U.S. could “end up with 2 million people on our border” and “a crisis on our hands that complicates what we’re trying to do.”

“Do not come,” Harris said on a trip to Guatemala in June 2021. “You will be turned back.”

Yet the message didn’t get through, and a variety of factors — foreign turmoil, a waning pandemic — triggered new surges at the border, overwhelming an under-resourced asylum system and flooding big cities with more new arrivals than they could handle.

Around this time, Biden announced that he was giving Harris essentially the same assignment he got during his vice presidency: coordinating diplomatic relationships to address the root causes of migration into the U.S., specifically from Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Politically, it was a no-win assignment; Harris tried to clarify that she was not in charge of border security or stopping the surge of migrants. But muddled messaging from administration officials along with Harris’s own missteps — “At some point, you know, we are going to the border,” she told NBC in a much-derided 2021 interview — gave Republicans an opening to blame her for the entire situation (even as Harris steered $9.2 billion in jobs investment to the Northern Triangle and migration from the region fell by 35 percent).

Initially, the Biden administration kept Title 42 in place (until May 2023), expelling five times more border crossers than Trump did (in large part because more migrants were trying to cross the border illegally).

Yet the administration’s broader approach — “expanding opportunities for migrants to arrive legally while applying tougher penalties to those who break the law,” as the Washington Post recently put it — didn’t stem the tide, and congressional Republicans repeatedly refused the president’s requests for more border funding.

As a result, national surveys have long shown that voters are unhappy about the border situation and prefer Republicans to handle it.

What they want to do next

What Trump wants to do next: More of the same — with the emphasis on more.

Among the ramped-up policies Trump is reportedly planning, according to the New York Times:

• “round[ing] up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain[ing] them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled”

• reviving his Muslim travel ban and his COVID-era Title 42 restrictions on the basis that “migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis”

• and “scour[ing] the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport[ing] people by the millions per year” by redirecting military funds and deploying federal agents, local police officers and National Guard soldiers to help ICE.

In an April interview with Time magazine, Trump confirmed that he is plotting “a massive deportation of people” using “local law enforcement” and the National Guard — and “if they weren’t able to,” he added, “then I’d use [other parts of] the military.”

He also refused to rule out detention camps, saying “it’s possible that we’ll do it to an extent.”

“We will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump promised in February, adding elsewhere that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and coming to the U.S. from “mental institutions.”

His inspiration, he has said, is the “Eisenhower model” — a reference to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 campaign, known by the ethnic slur “Operation Wetback,” to round up and expel Mexican immigrants in what amounted to a nationwide “show me your papers” rule.

“Mass Deportations Now!” read signs handed out by the Trump campaign at July’s Republican National Convention. “People focus on, ‘Well, how do you deport 18 million people?’ Let’s start with one million,” Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, explained in an August interview with ABC News. “And then we can go from there.”

Trump has also said he would suspend refugee resettlement, revive his “Remain in Mexico” policy and end DACA. He has even left the door open to resuming “zero tolerance” family separations.

What Harris wants to do next: Most Democrats spent 2023 avoiding border politics while privately fretting about how the issue might affect the 2024 election. But Biden finally bowed to GOP pressure last fall, agreeing to bipartisan border talks; the hope was that “a deal might take the issue off the table for his reelection campaign,” according to the New York Times.

In January, Senate negotiators actually struck a $20 billion bipartisan deal — a deal that gave the GOP much of what it had asked for, including provisions that would restrict claims for parole, raise the bar for asylum, speed the expulsion of migrants and automatically shutter the border if attempted illegal crossings reach a certain average daily threshold.

But Trump balked — and following his lead, Republicans on Capitol Hill effectively doomed the legislation.

Like Biden, Harris has vowed to sign the bipartisan border security bill if Congress sends it to her desk. In a new ad released Friday and set to air in Arizona and other battleground states, her campaign said that would mean "hir[ing] thousands more border agents... step[ping] up technology... and stop[ping] fentanyl smuggling and human trafficking." In Arizona Friday, Harris pledged deport border crossers more quickly, bar them from reentering for five years and impose criminal penalties on repeat offenders.

"The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them,” she said. “I take that responsibility very seriously.”

Harris also said in her August convention speech that America “can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system” by “creat[ing] an earned pathway to citizenship.”

Yet both of these initiatives — comprehensive immigration reform and increased border security — require congressional cooperation, something Harris is unlikely to get without big Democratic majorities or a fundamental shift in America’s partisan dynamics.

If elected, Harris is more likely to implement border policy by extending two executive orders that Biden issued in June: one that unilaterally allows border officials to block migrants from claiming asylum and rapidly turn them away once crossings exceed a certain threshold, and another that shields about 500,000 undocumented spouses with at least 10 years of U.S. residency from deportation while providing them with work authorization and a pathway to citizenship.

The first order was the “single most restrictive border policy instituted by … any modern Democrat,” according to the New York Times. The second was "one of the most expansive presidential actions to protect immigrants in more than a decade."

In September, Axios asked Harris’s campaign whether, as president, she would bypass Congress and revive her 2019 plan to provide a unilateral pathway to citizenship for Dreamers. Her campaign declined to answer or make her available for an interview.