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If you're getting ready to move, let Wirecutter help you make a plan at nytimes. Com/moving. From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. As vice President Kamala Harris moves into the final stretch of her campaign, one of the biggest issues for voters and for Republicans attacking her is the surge of migrants across the Southern border over the past four years and her role in it. Today, I talk to my colleague, Zolen Kano-Yams, about her record. It's Thursday, September fifth. So Zolen, we're gearing up for the presidential debate next week, and One of the biggest issues for voters is immigration. This is something that you and I have talked about a lot on the show, and we've talked about how there has been this real spike in border crossings over the past few years, record numbers, and Republicans are trying to pin those on Harris. Because we know Republicans and Trump are going to keep attacking her on this issue, we wanted to come to you, our expert, and ask you what exactly exactly her record has been on immigration and what we know about how she might approach that issue if she is elected.

Right. We do know that Republicans at this point are aggressively trying to attach vice President Kamala Harris to the border crisis that existed for much of the Biden administration. We also know that a lot of voters, including supporters of the Democratic Party, are trying to figure out and learn more the vice president on a variety of issues. This is one of them. While her role in the federal government was limited when it came to this issue, just by looking at the vice president's career dating back to early 2000s, when she was a prosecutor in California, we can start to get signs and indications of this leader's approach overall to the border and immigration.

Okay, so let's dig into that. Let's go back to those early days of hers in California. What was her job?

Harris was elected district Attorney of San Francisco in 2003. This was the start of her career as an elected official. Even then, a part of her work was dedicated to immigration. I think most would describe San Francisco as a liberal city. When it came to immigration, it was also known as a sanctuary city. That basically means that it was a city that didn't want its local law enforcement to pursue immigration enforcement. This leads to an interesting situation with Harris, because at the time, she actually locked heads with the board of supervisors over how to carry out that sanctuary city policy. Harris as well as the then mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom at the time, supported turning over juvenile, undocumented immigrants. If they were charged with committing a crime, they would be turned over to immigration enforcement.

Interesting. So essentially insisting that they be turned over to federal agents who would presumably deport them, which is a pretty hard line for a Democrat.

Yeah. At the time, in 2009, the New York Times reported that it resulted in roughly 100 undocumented immigrants, younger undocumented immigrants getting turned over to federal law enforcement, and you're exactly right, for potential or even likely deportation. Now, this got a lot of backlash from immigration advocates, also from the local board of supervisors at the time, because Those undocumented immigrants didn't need to have a conviction in order to be turned over ties. So there were accusations that actually those undocumented immigrants were not being given their full due process under law. But at the time, Harris said that this was necessary to maintain cooperation with federal law enforcement and that a sanctuary city status didn't exactly mean that you would issue blanket protection for undocumented immigrants that had committed crimes. That being said, her position and her approach was nuanced. She also worked within the law to also assist undocumented immigrants.

How did she do that? Tell me about that.

Well, I mean, one way is she went after employers who she accused of abusing undocumented immigrants by not paying them adequate wages. She also supported issuing these specialized visas for undocumented victims of violent crimes. She denounced proposed federal legislation that would have criminalized assisting undocumented undocumented immigrants. You are seeing somebody willing to pursue enforcement, but you're also seeing somebody that's willing to work within the law to provide some humanitarian relief to undocumented immigrants as well.

In other words, There are lots of sticks here. She's part of law enforcement. But when it comes to her approach to immigrants, there are carrots as well.

I think that's right. That's the approach that she would try to own when she became the top law enforcement officer in the the attorney general of California, a border state, a state with some of the most undocumented immigrants in the country, no longer just DA of liberal San Francisco, but now a large part of her responsibility was also how to approach immigration. Starting from about 2011, when she's starting her career as attorney general, you saw Harris really start to focus on the border and some of the criminal gangs and cartel organizations that she would say were facilitating the illegal crossings at the border and exploiting migrants at the time, analyzing different data trends and crimes committed by some of these transnational gangs and cartels. At one point, she led a delegation of other attorneys general to Mexico to learn more about cartels. So already you see somebody leaning into a law enforcement approach to tackle this issue.

Okay, so that's her California era. Then, of course, she's elected to the US Senate, which happens in 2016, which is the same year that former President Trump wins the presidency. He, of course, redefines the issue of immigration by coming up with policies that are pretty far to the right. How does she respond to that in her seat as senator?

Sure. Let's just describe this moment that Harris is coming to Washington. The Trump administration, in those early days, they were issuing a flurry of executive actions to change the way our immigration system worked. One of the more known examples were these travel bans that he issued, including travel bans against Muslim-majority countries. I talked to some of the people who worked with Harris when she was a sender at the time, and they were saying, Look, it was almost as soon as she got in, there was a need to now respond to some of these policies, utilize her connections in the legal world to pro-immigration advocates that she made connections with back in California to work with them on opposing some of these policies. Then also publicly, she became someone that was known, particularly in Congressional testimonies of Trump administration officials, as somebody who would almost cross-examine some of his top immigration advisors.

This was, of course, a period when the language we heard from Democrats became pretty limited to combating Trump in all of his border policies, which, of course, brings us to the primary campaign in 2019 and Harris's run for President.

Yeah, I mean, look, Democrats during the Trump era were on the defensive. In that time period, so many Democrats, including Harris, spent so much time investigating, criticizing, calling to question the Trump administration's approach to immigration. That It grew to define the overall rhetoric from Democrats on immigration, essentially not being Trump. That carried over as well to the presidential elections when it came to the different campaign platforms for each candidate. Democrats at that time in 2019 and going into the 2020 election, most of the time they spent their time basically saying how they would roll back Trump era policies or not do what he did. But there was a question about what they would do. And in some cases, they moved moved even further to the left than we've seen Democrats historically go on the border and immigration.

I will also immediately put in place a meaningful process for reviewing the cases for asylum. I will release children from cages. I will get rid of the private detention centers.

You see Harris criticizing a sweeping border policy known as Title 42 that essentially turned migrants away without giving most of them the opportunity to ask for protection in the US. You You see her even at one point express support for decriminalizing border crossings.

Let me just be very clear. We have to have a secure border, but I am in favor of saying that we're not going to treat people who are undocumented across the border as criminals. That's correct.

You see her saying that ICE might need to be overhauled as well.

Listen, 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. We need to probably think about starting from scratch. Right.

She took on these very pro-immigration stances as a primary candidate.

Right. But as we know, Harris's presidential campaign didn't last too long. She dropped out pretty early on, and she would later be picked as Biden's running mate. After coming into office, President Biden took a more hardline approach at the border than Democrats in modern history have taken, and his vice President went right along with him.

We'll be right back. Okay, so Harris becomes vice president and takes up the party line of the Biden administration on immigration. We know she had some role related to immigration in her job as vice president. What did she actually do?

Yeah, so the vice president had a pretty specific role when it comes to this issue. For one, I think it's worth saying that it wasn't like the vice president is the one who is deciding or shaping even the specific way to handle asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. She's not dictating border policy at the actual US-Mexico border. That's the home Security Secretary. That's not going to be the vice president's role. What her role was, was essentially addressing the poverty and the corruption in what's known as the Northern Triangle of Central America. We're talking about Guatemala, El El Salvador and Honduras, and these countries for years had made up many, at times the majority of migrants who were crossing the border into the United States. So her team describes this as addressing the root causes of migration, the societal systemic factors of poverty and violence that were pushing people to get up and take that dangerous journey to the United States.

Okay, so she's tasked with this root causes mission. How does she tackle that?

There's a two-part strategy to this role. One is that she's tasked with bolstering democratic institutions in this region. What does that mean? That's pressing leaders to ensure a free and fair election, right? Making making sure that those who are fairly elected actually make it to office, which was the case in Guatemala. Then the second is she's effectively a chief fundraiser. A huge part of her role was essentially getting together all of these business leaders that in the past might have been hesitant to invest in this region and using the office of the vice presidency to encourage them to invest in this region with the ultimate goal of creating jobs and training programs that that could help some of the families that at that time were considering traveling north to the United States.

Okay, did it actually work to bring down immigration levels?

Yeah, the short answer is we really won't know for years. When I've talked to business leaders that worked on this initiative, they told me and were clear-eyed that this was going to take as long as maybe a decade, definitely not within one presidential term, to see its full results. That speaks to just daunting of a task this is. I mean, I went on that first trip in 2021 with Harris to Guatemala. Actually, before she arrived, I got there before her and went to this rural village in Hueyue, Tinnango, in northern Guatemala, where There were plenty of families that had relatives that had made that trek to the United States. I asked them, was this initiative, the vice president's involvement, encourage you to stay home? They explained that their families for generations had traveled to US and found a way to support their families. That's the generational cycle that you're going up against here if you're Kamala Harris. So it was quite a daunting task. But it also was at a time of a global migration trend, a shift in global migration, where we had more migrants coming from different parts of South America as far as Africa and China.

Meanwhile, this strategy remained focused on the Northern Triangle. So there was also some criticism that it was slow to adapt in a way.

Basically, Harris did a fine job of the task she was asked to do, but it's just that that task was never going to be all that meaningful to the overall problem of too many migrants trying to cross into the United States.

Yeah, on its own, Harris's task was not going to be the primary policy response to the soaring number, the record number of illegal crossings that we saw in the short term. But that being said, said, Harris was still a part of this administration. She was still the number two, Biden's number two, when there were unaccompanied children and teenagers crossing in mass, encountering squalid border detention facilities in 2021, and rising all the way towards this past year, where in December of 2023, remember, we were getting 10,000 crossings a day at one point. The border and the administration's handling of immigration became a top concern for voters. You saw the Biden Whitehouse also respond to that pendulum shift, even working with a group of conservative Republicans in the Senate to draft a Senate bill that would severely restrict asylum at the Southwest border.

We know, of course, the fate of that legislation, it dies. It's torpedoed by former President Trump.

Yep, former President Trump did not want the White House to get this election year victory, which is how many saw it. So Trump torpedoes it, and then see the White House take action on their own and issue this executive order that is still in place today that did many of the things that that Senate bill would do, namely restricting asylum, restricting the ability for migrants to claim asylum, to get protection, to stay in the United States. Look, since that executive order was signed, we've seen border crossings plummet. I mean, that could be for a variety of reasons, but without a doubt, since President Biden, since the Biden White House issued this executive order, you've seen border crossings plummet.

Okay, so Harris inherits all of this once she becomes the nominee. But Since that time, she hasn't laid out a policy plan on the issue or given us a lot of detail about how she's thinking about it. Are we to assume that her campaign approach is just basically what he said? Like agreeing wholesale with Biden's policy?

Yeah, you're totally right. We have not seen Harris at this point issues a comprehensive policy platform on immigration. But make no mistake, the few times this has come up, the emphasis has been on border security. It has been on describing herself as the one person in the election that actually has investigated transnational criminal organizations, cartel organizations. It's been talking about her time as a prosecutor.

On the border, the The choice is simple. Kamala Harris supports increasing the number of border patrol agents.

Democrats even issued an advertisement for Harris.

Donald Trump blocked a bill to increase the number of border patrol agents.

In which they talked about that Senate bill that Trump torpedoed. You're not seeing her talk about it all the time, but the few times that she does talk about it, there's a similar emphasis on what we were hearing from President Biden.

So, Zolen, stepping back from everything you've told me, Harris doesn't really have the record on this issue that would show us any strong stance on immigration and border policy. She just doesn't have it. Just like a lot of things, she's hard to pin down. At the end of the day, her campaign policy is basically Biden's policy. That's what you're saying, and that's the policy Republicans, of course, are attacking. I guess I'm wondering, what do you think she would actually do if she wins? Would a Harris Whitehouse just be Biden 2.0 on immigration?

It's tough to say for many of the reasons you just described. Harris has never been somebody that fits easily into a bucket. She's somebody that her aides have said when it comes to each policy, and I think including immigration, wants to lean into the nuance and also wants to be pragmatic and not worry about being described as pro-immigration or pro-enforcement or what have you. I guess, though, the question is whether or not even that approach by Kamala Harris is one that's meeting Americans where they are on this issue. I mean, make no mistake about it, this is still a primary vulnerability for Democrats. After consecutive years of overseeing a record level of border crossings, we know this is something that Republicans will continue continue to attack her and Democrats in general on. What we do know, though, is that going into election day in a potential Harris administration, she would be the person now faced with these questions. Throughout the Biden era, Harris has almost been shielded in a way by her limited role. When the administration was faced with these tough questions about border crossings or about what the way forward was just for the overall immigration system, including legal immigration system.

Kamala Harris was able to say, I have a very specific lane, a very specific piece of this overall puzzle. Well, now the entire puzzle is going to be yours if you're a president. All of those questions about the border, how you're deciding who gets in and who stays out, and also just what the future is for this country when it comes to immigration. If she were to win, she's going to be the person that's going to be making those decisions.

She can no longer say say, That's not my job.

That's right. She will no longer be able to say that this assignment, this issue, is not her job.

Zolen, thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department was beginning a broad effort to curb what it said was Russia's attempt to influence the 2024 election. Garland announced the indictment of two Russian employees of RT, the state-owned Russian broadcaster, for secretly paying a company in Tennessee to spread English language videos which support the goals of the Russian government. He also said that American authorities were seizing web domains that US officials said the Kremlin uses to spread disinformation. And a 14-year-old student opened fire at his high school in suburban Atlanta on Wednesday, killing two students and two teachers before surrendering to school resource officers. Officials said that the suspect would be prosecuted as an adult. He has been on the radar of law enforcement officials for more than a year in connection with threats of a school shooting posted online. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Claire Tennis-Sketter, and Muj Zady. It was edited by M. J. Davis Lynn with help from Paige Cawet, contains original music by Alicia Buitu and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Ben Lansberg of WNDYRLE.

Special thanks to Hamid Ali-Aziz. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.