Updated August 01, 2024 at 17:20 PM ET
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On a three-day campaign swing through Nevada and Arizona, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance repeatedly pinned what he considers the border security failures of the Biden administration on Vice President Harris.
Starting in Henderson, Nev., on Tuesday and culminating in a brief tour of the border in Cochise County, Ariz., this morning, Vance repeatedly accused Harris of being at fault for record-setting numbers of border crossings earlier in the Biden administration.
“Kamala Harris owns every failure of the Biden administration over the last four years,” Vance told a crowd at Liberty High School in Henderson.
President Biden asked Harris to find ways to address the root causes of migration from Northern Triangle countries early on in her time as vice president. Republicans seized on that, calling her a "border czar" who did little to stop the recurring surges.
Vance hammered his a line of attack again at a rally in the west valley suburbs of Phoenix last night, and once more while standing alongside the border wall south of Sierra Vista, Ariz., where he met with border patrol officials and the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office.
“It's hard to believe until you see with your own eyes, just how bad the policies of the Kamala Harris administration have been when it comes to the southern border,” Vance said Thursday morning.
Vance employed that particular phrase — the “Harris administration” — repeatedly Thursday, as the Trump campaign moves to put Harris in the spotlight now that she’s the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Alongside Paul Perez, the president of the Border Patrol union, Vance vowed to reimplement deportations and other Trump-era immigration policies, like “Remain in Mexico.” Vance also touted Trump’s promise to resume construction of the border wall, pointing to abandoned materials along the U.S. side of the fence in Cochise County.
Vance said border patrol agents are “enraged” at the Biden administration because, Vance claimed, they “won’t let them do their jobs.”
“This can be stopped,” Perez added. “There is a playbook. President Trump had it. And he still has it. They can make it happen.”
Immigration is considered a winning issue for Republicans, particularly in border communities like those in Cochise County — and the Trump campaign hopes it carries weight in swing states like Arizona and Nevada.
Just ahead of Vance’s visit to the border Thursday, three Arizona border officials who endorsed Harris slammed Republicans for sidelining a bipartisan border deal earlier this year after Trump lobbied lawmakers to kill it. Biden had said he would sign that bill, and Harris vowed to do the same if elected.
One of the officials — Cochise County Supervisor Ann English — said that Trump and Republicans "continue to stand in the way" of action to secure the border. “That’s not fair to Arizonans," she said. "Vice President Kamala Harris understands our border communities and is dedicated to partnering with state and local officials to solve our broken border crisis.”
She also has sought to blunt criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of the border by reminding people of her roots as a prosecutor. Before she was elected vice president, and before that, a U.S. senator, Harris served as the California attorney general.
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