Vice President Kamala Harris visited the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday where she called for tighter asylum restrictions and vowed to make the smuggling of deadly fentanyl a “top priority” as she laid out plans to fix what she called "our broken immigration system.”
In her first trip to the southern border, Harris said she'd take action to keep the border closed between ports of entry. "Those who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended and removed and barred from re-entering for five years,” Harris said in Douglas, Arizona.
The VP also took the opportunity to lash out at her opponent, Donald Trump, who she accused of “fanning the flames of fear and division” over the impact of immigrants in the U.S.
Trump: ‘Worst Border Crisis In The History Of The World’
With immigration and border security a top issue for voters and with Arizona being a tightly contested state, Trump jumped right. “The architect of this destruction is Kamala Harris,” he said at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Friday. “She keeps talking about how she supposedly wants to fix the border. We would merely ask, Why didn’t she do it four years ago? It’s a very simple question.”
Prior to Harris's Arizona trip, Trump told the media on Thursday, also at Trump Tower that "For nearly four years, we have been living through the worst border crisis in the history of the world. There's never been anything like it, which has brought untold suffering, misery, and death upon our land."
He accused Harris of turning small US towns into “blighted refugee camps.”
"Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating inundation of illegal aliens. It's an inundation. It's an invasion," Trump said. "This influx has overwhelmed our schools. They're taking the seats of students that can no longer go there, and they don't even speak English."
Deadly Fentanyl And Mexican Cartels
Harris vowed to target the “entire global fentanyl supply chain" by increasing funding to prosecute criminal organizations, fentanyl manufacturers and smugglers, likely referring to Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. The DEA has said that most of the fentanyl trafficked across the southern border comes from the Sinaloa cartel, despite the fact that its leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán is serving a life sentence Colorado’s Supermax prison.
Fentanyl overdoses are the leading cause of death among Americans between the ages of 18 and 45. Over 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
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