How being the ‘border tsar’ became Kamala Harris’ biggest liability
Just weeks into her term as Joe Biden's vice-president, Kamala Harris was handed a responsibility that she would later have cause to regret.
In March 2021, the president tasked her with tackling the "root causes" of illegal migration from Central America, placing her in the firing line as border crossings soared to record highs during her four years in office.
"I gave you a tough job," Mr Biden laughed at a press conference as he made the announcement. Sitting beside him, Ms Harris's expression was inscrutable behind her Covid facemask.
Immigration would go on to become the key issue of the presidential election, and a massive liability for the Democrat .
Barely a day has gone by without Trump hammering the Biden administration for its inability to get a grip on illegal crossings and branding Ms Harris a failed "border tsar".
In a YouGov poll conducted in late October, 49 per cent of those surveyed said Trump would do a better job handling immigration, compared with just 35 per cent for Ms Harris. Shortly before election day, pollster Nate Silver predicted : "The border may tip the election to Trump."
Trump, after years of railing against illegal immigration, has once again managed to capture the headlines with outlandish claims and schemes to clamp down on "migrant crime".
Ms Harris has tried to reinvent herself as the most hawkish Democratic candidate on immigration in recent memory, in an apparent attempt to contain the damage.
But she has been hamstrung by her liberal inclinations on the issue – she had mulled abolishing the immigration enforcement agency in 2020 – and her dire record in office.
Telegraph analysis suggests migrants illegally crossed the border every four minutes since she became vice president, while illegal migration is 25 per cent higher than official figures indicated . Almost 250,000 migrants – a record number – were arrested by border force in December.
At the same time, the murders of Laken Riley , a 22-year-old nursing student, and 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, allegedly by illegal migrants from Venezuela, have caused widespread uproar among voters. Trump has accused Mr Harris of having "blood on her hands".
The vice-president has attempted to distance herself from the Biden administration's record, with mixed success. Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, praised Ms Harris for running on "the most conservative policy platform on the border" in modern Democratic history.
"I don't want to suggest it's been anything but a battlefield conversion for them," he told The Telegraph.
"But the beauty is, you have a woman of colour, a black woman, who's leading the Democratic party out of this identity politics headlock that they've placed themselves in."
In September, Ms Harris made her first trip to the border in three years , pledging to block those who attempted to cross into the US illegally from entering the country and imprison repeat offenders.
$650m wall
Attempting to pin the blame for illegal immigration on Trump, she said she would revive a bill sabotaged by the Republican that would limit the number of daily border crossings.
Its provisions mean that Ms Harris supports spending $650 million on a border wall to repel migrants.
It was a transformation for Ms Harris, who had once called the wall a "vanity project", and a sign of how the immigration issue has cut through with voters. Democrats had bitterly opposed the wall during Trump's first term in the White House.
However, while polling shows Ms Harris has chipped away at Trump's advantage on immigration, the Republican has maintained a sizeable lead on the issue throughout the race.
Having provoked outrage among Democrats and liberal commentators since emerging as a political force almost a decade ago, Trump has once again cut through the news cycle with proposals Ms Harris could not or would not follow.
At the sole presidential debate in September, he was widely considered to have performed worse than his Democrat rival. But he had the quote of the night when he attacked Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
"They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats," he claimed. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there."
Local officials pushed back on the characterisation but Trump doubled down. "What about the geese?" he insisted, unruffled.
The following month, he claimed that the city of Aurora in Colorado had been overrun by Tren de Aragua , a Venezuelan gang thought to operate out of several apartment blocks, despite the denials of the Republican mayor.
He announced a crackdown on this "migrant crime" by using 18th-century legislation to deport gang members, while enforcing a mandatory death penalty against migrants who kill American citizens.
Those who attempted to fact-check Trump's claims – like the ABC News host Martha Raddatz – were accused of tacitly accepting foreign gangs on the streets of the US.
No other issue has managed to cut through the 2024 race like immigration.
How far Ms Harris has been able to defend herself from Trump's attacks and press home her advantage on other issues where she leads her rival, such as abortion rights, is unclear.
But whoever emerges as the winner on polling day, this election has laid bare how Trump has elevated immigration as a campaign issue and permanently shifted the debate to the Right.
