Harris heads to US-Mexican border as Trump sharpens migrant rhetoric

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris walk on the balcony of her ceremonial office before a private meeting, on the White House campus on September 26, 2024, in Washington, DC. [AFP]

US Vice President Kamala Harris travels to the US-Mexican border Friday to try to show she is tough on migration, a key election issue on which Donald Trump has dramatically stepped up his incendiary rhetoric in recent weeks.

Harris's visit to Douglas in Arizona is her first to the border since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate in July, and comes as Republican Trump repeatedly attacks her for being weak on illegal border crossings.

False and racist claims about migrants by Republicans, and former president Trump's promises of mass expulsions, have turbocharged the issue in a close-fought White House race that is less than six weeks away.

Harris's campaign said she would call for tougher border security measures in a speech at the border in Douglas, and blame Trump for killing off Biden's efforts to pass a recent bipartisan bill on migration.

"The American people deserve a President who cares more about border security than playing political games," she plans to say, according to her campaign.

The Democrat accuses Trump of lobbying Republicans in the US Congress to tank the bill, which would have given more funding to border security, because he feared it would hurt him politically.

Harris will also meet border agents during her visit, which will see the 59-year-old talk up her former career as a prosecutor involved in tackling gangs smuggling drugs across the border, the campaign said.

Republicans have long seen Harris as vulnerable on migration, as well as the economy. Recent polls have seen her eat into Trump's lead on the subject since taking over from Biden, but the gap remains significant enough to merit Friday's trip.

'Save her airfare' 

Trump has doubled down on his divisive rhetoric targeting migrants, with the 78-year-old billionaire seeing it as appealing to his base of largely white, blue-collar voters.

On the eve of Harris's visit, he blasted the vice president as the "architect of this destruction" and said she had "completely destroyed" the southern border with Mexico.

"She should save her airfare. She should go back to the White House and tell the president to close the border," he said in remarks to the press in New York on Thursday.

Trump also repeated his claim that migrants were "infecting our country," using language that Biden has previously compared to that used by Nazi Germany.

"Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating inundation of illegal aliens. It's an inundation. It's an invasion," he said.

Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have in recent weeks played up false stories about Haitian migrants eating pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio.

Their baseless, widely debunked claims triggered a climate of fear in the city's Haitian community -- but they doubled down with Vance even saying he was willing to "create stories so that the American media actually pays attention."

Harris blasted Trump as "extreme" for spreading the stories when the pair met in their first and so far only televised debate on September 10.