Kamala Harris Has Gone From Immigration Reformer to Border Hawk. What’s Next?

In June 2021, Kamala Harris was on her first foreign trip as vice president, to Mexico and Guatemala. During a press conference with then-Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, she issued a warning to Guatemalans and others who were considering trying to enter the United States without proper documentation: “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders.… If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”

The remarks quickly made headline news. After four years of former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant vitriol, many immigration advocates had hoped for a return to a more open approach to U.S. immigration policy. Trump’s first term in office had been, for many working on immigration reform, one conflagration after the next. His 2016 campaign leaned heavily on his promise to build a wall across the southern border, and his demonization of immigrants became — and remains — one of the hallmarks of his campaign stump speeches. Harris’s remarks, with their hard-edged, uncompromising tone, induced whiplash. In a quick soundbite, Harris had suddenly become the face of the new administration’s immigration approach.

Harris’s comments were a harbinger of the aggressive efforts President Joe Biden’s administration would soon make to curb the number of Central American migrants coming through Mexico. Immigration consistently ranks as one of U.S. voters’ top priorities, and Democrats worry that the party is perceived as “weak” on the issue. Panicked by that opinion polling and constantly antagonized by Republicans arguing for even stricter border policy, Biden and his advisers have worked hard to appear tough on immigration. During his presidency, in fact, Biden has stayed on pace to meet, or exceed, the number of deportations Trump oversaw during his tenure.

Harris was not supposed to become the face of the day-to-day machinations of deportations and border policing, though. Rather, Biden’s team had tasked her with anchoring a strategy they had termed the “Root Causes” approach. According to the Biden administration, this policy aimed to tackle the underlying causes of social instability in three Central American countries which, when the strategy was launched, had some of the highest rates of asylum claims and undocumented immigration at the southern border: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. This strategy was meant to be largely diplomatic, with the U.S. using its global standing to leverage a mix of humanitarian aid and political pressure to encourage leaders of those countries to stem the tide of out-migration at home.

So far, this strategy has had a mixed track record, at best. Critics have pointed to the difficulties of applying a one-size-fits-all approach to three countries with markedly different political and social configurations, as well as unanticipated increases in migration from other countries not targeted by the strategy, especially Venezuela. While immigration across the southern border is down in 2024, the Democratic Party has struggled to come up with a cohesive policy. Meanwhile, Harris has not sought to position herself in a way where she could credibly take credit for any change in undocumented immigration.

This is partly due to the fact that Harris never fully embraced her role in leading the Root Causes initiative. From the earliest days of being appointed to lead the strategy, Harris took pains to ensure that she was not perceived as responsible for the administration’s overarching immigration policy. The Root Causes strategy was a specific, diplomatic effort, not a panacea aimed at resolving all of the U.S.’s immigration issues. Harris seemed ambivalent about her remit as the figurehead of the engagement strategy with Central America, and was criticized for her infrequent travel to the region and appearing to deprioritize that part of her portfolio as vice president.

While her uneven approach to immigration policy as vice president suggests that she might deemphasize the issue were she to win the presidential election in November, her record as a U.S. senator, a state prosecutor and a presidential candidate suggests the opposite.

As a state prosecutor in California, first as San Francisco’s district attorney and then as the attorney general of California, Harris was generally viewed as a supporter of immigrant rights. She publicly opposed efforts by Republicans in Congress to enable law enforcement to more aggressively profile and target suspected undocumented immigrants. She also defended San Francisco’s sanctuary city ordinance, even in the face of intense public scrutiny and Republican-led opposition during the early days of the Trump administration.

As a U.S. senator — a position she was elected to in 2016 — Harris continued to adopt stances on immigration that positioned her at the progressive end of the political spectrum in Congress, often to the left of most of her Democratic colleagues. Her first speech in the Senate, which leaned heavily on her background as the daughter of immigrant parents, was a defense of immigration. Her speech was also an attack on the Trump administration, which had recently unveiled a raft of draconian anti-immigrant policies, including the so-called Muslim ban and a policy that sought to separate families detained while crossing the southern border.

Harris’s advocacy in the Senate for immigrant rights went beyond lip service. In 2019, she introduced a bill that would have redirected funding from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Department of Justice and other federal agencies tasked with refugee resettlement and combating human trafficking. The bill also would have put significant prohibitions on ICE’s ability to use information obtained from unaccompanied children to prosecute other individuals who might be living in the U.S. without documentation.

Harris was also more broadly critical of ICE, telling NBC’s Kasie Hunt in 2018 that there was a need to “critically reexamine ICE … and the way it is being administered.… We need to probably think about starting from scratch [with ICE].” Significantly, Harris’s remarks came at a time when ICE was under intense scrutiny, spurred by the Abolish ICE movement. Her commentary cannily nodded at the movement, while her legislative approach evinced a much more tepid, reform-oriented approach to remedying the agency’s many woes.

Harris foregrounded her immigration reform stances amid the outcry that followed the Trump administration’s implementation of some of the harshest border policies ever put in place by a U.S. president. Her progressive approach to immigration reform continued into her campaign to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2020. During a presidential debate, she joined her competitors in agreeing that her proposed health plan would include coverage for undocumented immigrants. She also called for decriminalizing border crossings, a substantially more progressive position than Democratic Party orthodoxy at the time of the 2020 primary.

If there is one through line, then, that defines Harris’s approach to immigration policy, it’s that her stances have often been a direct reaction to the political moment. When Trump was touting his tough-on-immigration approach, Harris sought to stand out, first as attorney general, and then as the junior senator from California, in stridently supporting the rights of immigrants, whether they had come to the U.S. legally or not. As vice president, she has moderated her stance considerably, from the infamous “do not come” press conference, to her support for a failed bipartisan border security bill that was criticized by progressives for adopting right-wing proposals on immigration.

As she seeks to define and differentiate her immigration policy from Biden’s, the current political moment presents a bit of a bind for Harris. Undocumented immigration is a major concern for voters — stoked by racist, right-wing fearmongering by politicians and in the media — and a slim majority now appear to be in favor of mass deportations. Cognizant of the likelihood that Trump will want to own the immigration issue heading into November, Harris and her advisers have tried to get ahead of her opponent.

But, beating Trump at his own game could prove tricky for Harris. She is promising to be tough on immigration, touting her backing of the border security bill which, among other things, would have increased funding for border patrols and detention facilities. She is also pointing out that, as California’s attorney general, she prosecuted “transnational gangs, drug cartels, and human traffickers that came into [the] country illegally.” While Harris’s advisers wager that enforcement-focused talk will convince voters that she can be trusted on border security, Harris may also run the risk of alienating progressives and immigration-reform activists.

Whether these policies become reality if Harris wins the presidency remains to be seen. Biden started his tenure as president promising to take a more lenient approach to immigration, only to adopt a more hard-line position as undocumented immigration surged in the first years of his term. With a record of tailoring her approach on immigration to the political moment, Harris, too, may find herself chasing after history instead of making it.