Kamala Harris tried to attack Donald Trump on her favorite ground on Friday, going to the Mexican border where she promised to “do more” to strengthen security and to reform the “broken immigration system” of the United States. United.
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For this first trip to the region in three years, the American vice-president defended a balanced policy and denounced her opponent in the race for the White House, accused of “using rhetoric rather than results”.
“He has worsened the difficulties at the border, and he continues to fan the flames of fear and division,” she said in Douglas, a border town in Arizona, a southwestern state that will be key to the November election.
The 78-year-old billionaire had lobbied for Republican parliamentarians to block a bill brought by President Joe Biden, which would have significantly toughened American migration policy.
If she is elected, Mme Harris promised to resurrect the law, which included making deportation procedures easier and hiring thousands more border agents and judges.
AFP
The text was the “strongest compromise we have seen in decades,” assured the Democrat.
She also promised to “do more to secure our border (and) to reduce illegal arrivals” of migrants.
To do this, this former prosecutor intends to prohibit immigrants who arrived illegally in the United States from claiming asylum.
She also wants to strengthen law enforcement personnel and deploy more equipment to detect fentanyl, a synthetic opiate that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year.
AFP
Trump on the offensive
With this trip, the Democratic candidate hoped to convince the undecided, on a subject seen as one of her weak points.
Donald Trump, who promises mass deportations, with a lot of violent rhetoric, has imposed immigration as his favorite theme. He recently spread false information about Haitian migrants eating dogs and cats in Ohio.
The former Republican president accuses Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of having transformed the border into a sieve and tirelessly denounces the “incompetence” of Kamala Harris, recalling that Joe Biden had charged the vice-president with a mission on the roots of immigration.
“Kamala Harris should cancel her press conference,” Mr. Trump mocked earlier Friday.
At a rally in the swing state of Michigan, he twisted official figures to falsely claim that “more than 13,000 murder convicts” crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration and were “released from prison , wandering our streets.
Getty Images via AFP
In fact, these recently released government statistics show that 425,000 immigrants with criminal records live in the United States, more than 13,000 of whom have been convicted of murder.
The data does not specify how long these individuals have been living in the United States, and experts estimate that many of them have been here since before the Biden administration, if not for decades.
“These are people who have already been charged and convicted and who have served their sentences,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council told AFP.
Under the Trump presidency, hundreds of thousands of immigrants with criminal records were already present in American society, he recalled.
“The only reason they cannot be deported is due to diplomatic issues with their home country and has nothing to do with U.S. government policy or practices,” he added.
“False choice”
In Arizona, Kamala Harris also refused the “fallacious choice between securing our borders and creating a safe and humane immigration system.”
“We can and we must do both,” she insisted, promising to work with Congress to “fix our broken immigration system.”
Currently, “it sometimes takes years for asylum applications to be decided,” she recalled.
To change this, it wants to hire more staff and develop the processing of applications directly in the countries of origin.
She also invoked an old sea serpent of American politics, promising “a path to citizenship for hard-working immigrants who have been here for years.”
A message for the many immigrants in the agricultural sector and “Dreamers», these immigrants who arrived in the United States as children and have lived for years in the country without American nationality.
Often Latin American, they belong to an electorate that will weigh heavily in November.
