Hispanic leaders and civil-rights groups are backing the vice president, despite their clashes with the Biden administration on border policy.
By Jazmine Ulloa, New York Times
No issue is likely to be thornier on the campaign trail for Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, than immigration. Republicans are falsely painting her as President Biden’s failed “border czar” and running ads tying her to Biden administration policies that they argue have contributed to chaos at the border.
But condemnation has also come from liberal and progressive Democrats, who along with immigrant-rights groups have faulted Ms. Harris as part of an administration that they say has ceded ground on the issue to Mr. Trump and his allies.
In one of the most striking moments in Ms. Harris’s tenure as vice president, she drew swift criticism from Latino elected officials and immigrant-rights leaders for her admonishment to the growing ranks of migrants in the summer of 2021. “Do not come,” she told them, in a news conference in Guatemala, where she was on a diplomatic tour.
Robert Rivas, a California state lawmaker, helped the Latino Legislative Caucus draft a fierce statement in opposition to those remarks, urging her and the administration not to discourage asylum seekers “from doing what they need to do to survive.”
But three years later, Mr. Rivas, now the speaker of the California Assembly, endorsed Ms. Harris within minutes of President Biden’s exit from the race on Sunday. He is one of many of those same leaders who are quickly setting aside their disputes with the White House, saying Ms. Harris is far preferable to former President Donald J. Trump.
“Trump was an absolute disaster for our country, and there’s just no comparison between the two candidates,” Mr. Rivas said, citing Mr. Trump’s punitive record against immigrants from Latin American and Muslim-majority countries.
Surveys and focus groups showed that more Latino voters, like most American voters, trusted Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden and Democrats to handle the southern border. More have also warmed up to tougher immigration enforcement measures, as the number of migrants apprehended hit records last year and Republicans continue to decry them as invaders, criminals and potential terrorists.
Alfonso Aguilar, director for Hispanic engagement at the American Principles Project, a socially conservative think thank, contended Ms. Harris would have trouble distancing herself from Biden administration policies that had turned off many Hispanics.
“It’s a different person, but it’s the same policies, the same problems,” he said.
Latino Democratic leaders said they saw the chance for a reset with Ms. Harris, and some immigrant-rights leaders who once criticized her for saying “do not come” said they believed she had learned from that experience and would take a different approach as president.
Her supporters cite her upbringing as the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, and her experience forging her political path in California, a state where roughly 40 percent of the population is Latino and almost half of children have one immigrant parent.
“That background brings empathy and understanding to the immigrant agenda,” said Héctor Sánchez Barba, president Mi Familia Vota, a group that works to mobilize Latino voters.
Mr. Sánchez Barba has loudly denounced the Biden administration’s actions to shut down the border and curb asylum. But he was among the Latino leaders who attended a barbecue on Thursday at Ms. Harris’s Washington residence, where they had the chance to discuss policy and Latino voter outreach with the vice president. Mr. Sánchez Barba and other attendees said they had left feeling “hopeful” that Ms. Harris would be able to articulate a vision that would balance border enforcement with improving legal pathways for citizenship.
Ms. Harris has already drawn the endorsements of Latino Democrats, including Senator Alex Padilla of California, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Representatives Joaquin Castro and Veronica Escobar of Texas. She also has the support of three major Latino voter-turnout and civil-rights organizations: Mi Familia Vota, Voto Latino and UnidosUS Action Fund.
Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS Action Fund, said those groups would help Ms. Harris’s campaign address skepticism over her immigration record with messaging and volunteers in key races involving large or fast-growing Latino populations, including those in Arizona, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. She and other leaders have also been working to increase their coordination, she said, as they have sought to apply lessons learned from 2016. That year, Mr. Trump’s campaign demonized Mexicans and immigrants, but few Latino leaders believed he could win.
“There’s a sense of urgency to unify quickly behind Vice President Harris,” she said.
The Harris campaign offered a glimpse into her immigration message in a virtual call with Latinas on Wednesday that drew an estimated 4,500 participants, including celebrities and elected officials, and raised about $118,000. The call opened with a video of her speaking and meeting supporters as she described generations of immigrants who had made the nation stronger, and her mother’s arrival to the United States at 19. (Hundreds of women flooded the chat, with calls of “Yes!” “Wepa!” and “Sí se puede!”)
In the weeks ahead, Ms. Harris will have a fine needle to thread between toughness and compassion, and even some Latino Democrats and immigrant-rights leaders acknowledged division among Hispanic voters.
Ms. Harris’s record leaves her vulnerable to criticism from both the right and the left.
Conservatives note that as a prosecutor, attorney general and senator in California, she fell in line with Democrats who sought to expand and protect the rights of undocumented immigrants in the state. She developed close connections with the United Farm Workers union and Latino labor leaders such as Dolores Huerta.
During the Trump presidency, Ms. Harris went viral for grilling U.S. officials over their treatment of young undocumented immigrants and for opposing a ban on travelers from certain countries, most of them with Muslim majorities. She also was the first senator to call on Kirstjen Nielsen, Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary, to step down over his administration’s zero-tolerance policy, which led to the separations of families at the border.
Ms. Harris must also contend with criticism from liberals over the Biden administration’s aggressive approach to border enforcement, a reversal of Mr. Biden’s pledges to roll back Trump policies when he took office. Her first assignment on immigration as vice president was the diplomatic mission of addressing the root causes that spurred people to flee Central American countries, which led her to that fateful appearance in Guatemala.
People who worked closely with her on that front praised her work with recalcitrant Latin American leaders, saying she had helped prompt more than $5 billion in private and public investments in the region to create jobs, expand internet access and connect people with banking services.
But Republicans have continued to malign Ms. Harris, because, among other things, her diplomatic effort did not tackle what immigration analysts say is now at the at heart of the challenges at the border. The migration boom has erupted farther south, through the perilous jungle known as the Darien Gap, and smuggling networks are moving migrants from a much broader array of countries.
Alejandra Gomez, executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, a Latino voter mobilization group credited with fueling Democratic wins in state elections, said that while some of her members had criticized Ms. Harris’s statement in Guatemala, they nonetheless endorsed her unanimously on Sunday.
“We have to remain focused on the bigger picture here,” Ms. Gomez said.
Link to original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/27/us/politics/latino-kamala-harris-immigration.html
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