Immigration and Border Security: Harris vs. Trump

null - Immigration continues to be one of the top issues that concerns voters going into the November election.

According to Gallup, Americans named immigration as the top issue facing the country earlier this year, surpassing even the share who cited the economy despite persistently higher prices.

Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump have addressed the issue on the campaign trail in different ways, hoping it would translate to votes in the race for the White House.

Where immigration currently stands

Arrests of migrants for illegally crossing the border to the United States from Mexico plummeted about 30% in July to a new low for Joe Biden’s presidency after he instituted new asylum policies. Asylum would not be granted when the number of border encounters between ports of entry hits 2,500 per day.

Migration numbers have spiked and dropped during both presidencies. Border Patrol arrests on the southern border fell in Trump’s first year in office, then shot back up his next two, rising to more than 850,000 in 2019. The numbers plunged in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic before rising even higher during Biden’s presidency, reaching a peak of more than 250,000 encounters in December 2023, before falling below 84,000 in June of 2024, federal statistics show.

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More than 22 million people live in a U.S. household where at least one occupant is in the country without authorization, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of 2022 Census data. That represents nearly 5% of households across the U.S. and 5.5% in Arizona, a battleground state where the Latino vote could be key.

What Harris says about border security

Harris has not given many specifics as to how she plans to tackle the border crisis.

She previously promoted a border security bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated earlier this year, which Republican lawmakers ultimately opposed en masse at Republican nominee Donald Trump’s behest.

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During the Democratic National Convention, Harris said she would promote the bill again.

"As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law," she said. "I know — I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border."

Harris also wants a faster track for young immigrants living in the country illegally who arrived as children.

The border bill represented one of the most conservative and comprehensive proposals in decades to emerge from a bipartisan negotiation in Congress. It would seek to tamp down the historic number of illegal border crossings by making the asylum process tougher and faster.

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Presidential administrations would also be given authority to deny migrants from claiming asylum at the border if the number of migrants claiming asylum becomes unmanageable for authorities.

What Trump has said about border security

Meanwhile, Trump has worked closely with Stephen Miller, a former top aide who is expected to take a senior role in the White House if Trump wins. Miller describes a Trump administration that will work with "utter determination" to accomplish two goals: "Seal the border. Deport all the illegals."

To accomplish that, Trump would revive travel bans from countries deemed undesirable, such as majority-Muslim countries. He would launch a sweeping operation by deputizing the National Guard to round up immigrants, hold them in massive camps and put them on deportation flights before they could make legal appeals.

He’d also bring back policies he put in place during his first term, like the Remain in Mexico program and Title 42, which placed curbs on migrants on public health grounds. And he’d revive and expand the travel ban that originally targeted citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. 

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, he pledged new "ideological screening" for immigrants to bar "dangerous lunatics, haters, bigots, and maniacs." He’d also try to deport people who are in the U.S. legally but harbor "jihadist sympathies." He’d seek to end birthright citizenship for people born in the U.S. whose parents are both in the country illegally.

How Harris views the border crisis

Harris took several progressive stances on immigration when she sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. She wanted immigrants who were in the country illegally to be eligible for government healthcare, and she wanted to decriminalize border crossings.

When Harris became Biden’s vice president, the administration unraveled some of Trump’s harshest immigration policies, and Harris worked on improving conditions in Central American countries to reduce the flow of migrants toward the United States. However, illegal crossings reached historic levels, creating a political crisis for the White House. Republicans have blamed Harris for failures to secure the border.

How Trump sees the border crisis

Meanwhile, Immigration has been at the center of Trump’s political identity since he announced his first campaign in 2015. He paints a picture of a border that is out of control, threatening national security and the economy. If elected to a second term, he’s pledged to deport millions of people living in the country illegally.

GOP has attacked Harris over border handling

House Republicans are moving quickly to emphasize Vice President Kamala Harris’s role in the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. border with Mexico, passed a resolution in July that condemned her performance in the job.

However, Harris was never the "border czar," or put in charge of border security or halting illegal border crossings, as Trump, Republicans and even the occasional media outlet have claimed. Instead, she was tasked in March 2021 with tackling the "root causes" of migration from the Northern Triangle and pushing its leaders — along with Mexico’s — to enforce immigration laws, administration officials said.

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Harris has defended her work, and her campaign began running a television ad that said Harris as president would "hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking."

Most House Democrats tried to defend how Harris has handled the job.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, who is the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Harris "was narrowly tasked with developing agreements that could help bring government and private sector investments to those countries that are sending migrants to the United States."

Democrats also repeatedly pointed out that Republicans rejected a border and immigration deal that the White House negotiated with Senate GOP leadership earlier this year.