Trump turns to Harris, focusing on immigration and her record as “border czar”

President Donald Trump, at a 2016 campaign event in Raleigh. (CJ photo by Don Carrington)

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  • "I will terminate every open border policy of the Biden-Harris Administration on day one,” he said. “I will seal the border, stop the invasion and keep America safe.” said Trump in a phone call with reporters on Tuesday.

Ahead of his Wednesday visit to Charlotte, President Donald Trump held a call with reporters Tuesday afternoon to drive home a core message as his campaign shifts to a new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. The call focused on her track record as “border czar.” Brandon Judd, immediate past president of the National Border Patrol Council, and Paul Perez, the Council’s current president, were also on the call.

President Joe Biden ended his bid for re-election Sunday, endorsing Harris. In the 24 hours after the announcement, Democrat donors laid out more than $81 million for Harris’ 100-day sprint to Election Day.

There is work ahead for Harris and the Democrats. A new YouGov poll, shows Trump leading Harris in a head-to-head matchup, by 5 percentage points, 44% to 39%. The poll published on Monday also shows Trump leading Harris by 15 points on handling immigration, despite Biden directing that the issue be one of her most public responsibilities as vice president.

This comes as the U.S. Border Patrol reports that unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border is hitting all-time highs. In December 2023, the number of encounters reached nearly 250,000.

On the call, Trump told reporters that if Harris were allowed to become president, the country would be “permanently destroyed.”

Judd told reporters that in 2015, the National Border Patrol Council vetted all the 2016 election candidates and decided that Trump was their candidate on border security.  

“He was open to ideas and never acted like he knew everything,” he said. “In him, we saw someone that would cut through Washington bureaucracy to implement actual border security policies. Fast forward to 2021, and we saw the exact opposite.”

Judd said that he presented several policy proposals to Harris, but she ultimately shot them down. He told reporters that instead of addressing the cartels, she explained the border crisis as a “climate and political instability issue” in the more than 160 countries from which people are coming.

“Under Vice President Harris’ oversight as the border czar, cartel profits skyrocketed,” Judd told reporters, citing a 2022 New York Times article showing cartels made $13 billion revenue in human smuggling, up from $500 million in 2018.

While many know of the stories of rapes and murders committed by illegal immigrants in the US, what often goes unnoticed, he said, is the migrant suffering seen on a daily basis.

“We see little girls crying nonstop who exhibit the signs of rape and abuse,” Judd said. “We see migrants robbed of all their possessions, and I dare say, VP Harris has never responded to the scene of an accident caused by a smuggler that leaves people trapped in vehicles to burn to death or a vehicle accident to leave persons thrown over the road. I have, and what is now a regular occurrence was a very rare occurrence under President Trump.”

“dangerously incompetent”

Judd accused Harris of being both politically power-hungry for base support and dangerously incompetent. Perez echoed the sentiments, saying Trump has done more for the country and border security than any of the five presidents he has served under in his 27-year career.

“Under President Trump, we had a total of 1.7 million encounters,” Perez said. “Under Biden, we have had almost 10 million encounters and 1.8 million gotaways. Those are people that cross the border that we were not able to apprehend and determine who they were. They are in this country illegally, and because of the amount of people that this administration has allowed into the country, there is very little possibility that we will be able to apprehend them all.”

Trump criticized the Biden Administration for ending his Safe Third Agreement and the Remain in Mexico policies and stopping construction of the wall. Construction was resumed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Harris’ effort on the southern border has gotten extra scrutiny in the few days since becoming the leading Democratic Party candidate for president, ahead of the DNC convention in August. In 2021, Biden assigned the vice president the work of pursing policy to address the “root causes” of illegal immigration.

As her first high-profile project, Republicans say she failed on immigration and expect this to be the centerpiece of the case against her. Perez told reporters Harris never spoke to the Border Patrol chief and when she made her first and only visit to the border, she visited a place an area far away from the epicenter of the problem.

Trump told reporters that, as a senator from California Harris was in favor of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2018, Harris did draw parallels between ICE and the KKK but says she was not advocating abolishing it completely.

“I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically re-examine ICE and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing,” She told MSNBC at the time. “We need to probably think about starting from scratch because there is a lot that is wrong with the way that it’s conducting itself, and we need to deal with that.”

“She supports the total decriminalization of illegal border crossings and making illegal immigration the equivalent of a parking ticket,” Trump said on the Tuesday call. “She raised her hand in favor of giving free taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal aliens but not to our soldiers and our people that served our country so brilliantly, so valiantly, that are living on the streets. She supports mass amnesty and citizenship for all illegal aliens, even if they’re criminals, which will obliterate Medicare and Social Security for American seniors.”

Moving forward, Trump announced plans to travel to the border during the closing months of the campaign. He also said, with less than 4,000 ICE officers in the country, if elected he will increase the resources for tackling illegal immigration by enlisting the help of local police to help with the arrests of millions of people who are here illegally.

North Carolina has seen its share of issues with illegal immigration, including an incident with a terror watchlist suspect. In a March Carolina Journal poll, immigration was the top issue to 25% of North Carolina’s likely voters.

debates ahead?

Trump told reporters that he would be open to debating Harris more than once, saying that although she would be the same as Biden regarding policy, he considers her more radical and easier to debate because Biden was a more mainstream candidate.  

When asked if Trump thought that Biden made the decision himself to drop out of the race or if former President Barack Obama had any part in it.

“Well, Obama can’t stand him, and he can’t stand Obama,” Trump told the reporter. “Obama had a part because he said he wasn’t going to support him. Nancy Pelosi dumped him; they all dumped him, and they said either you get out or we’re going to go after you, and that’s what happened, and he had no choice.”

When Harris ran in the 2020 primary for the Democratic Party nomination she suspended her campaign by December of 2019, dropping out before Iowa. Trump sees that as a signal of what’s to come.

“If she campaigns the way she campaigned then, I suspect she won’t be too tough,” Trump said.

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