Harris’s “Border-State Prosecutor” Rebrand Is a Concession

In one of her first big 2024 campaign ad buys last month, Vice President Kamala Harris debuted her new brand: “border-state prosecutor.” The ad, called “Tougher,” features images of the wall at the southern border, dwarfing a half-dozen small tents in a makeshift camp. Harris poses at a lectern before what appears to be a large haul of illegal drugs, a voiceover saying she “spent decades fighting violent crime at the border”; that she “took on drug cartels and jailed gang members.” As vice president, it goes on, she “backed the toughest border control bill in decades.” And as a candidate she pledges to hire thousands more Border Patrol agents and to “crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” The ad closes with an image of Harris addressing a line of uniformed immigration enforcement officers.

One of the striking features of the Harris campaign, as several of my TNR colleagues have observed, has been its wholesale adoption of the Trump campaign’s framing on immigration. In particular, Harris appears to be capitulating to the way Trump and his campaign have declared “crime” the defining feature of immigration issues: Unchecked, Republicans warn, immigration will lead to waves of “migrant crime,” of women and girls being “trafficked,” of communities wiped out by fentanyl. These claims do nothing for women’s and girls’ safety or drug users; they scapegoat immigrant communities. Why would Harris accept this narrative? One clue may lie in her “Tougher” ad and similar rhetoric from the campaign since then: If Harris can become a “border state prosecutor,” she can appeal to the voters who might see her tough-on-crime record as an asset, while sidestepping critiques of her actual record as a prosecutor.

Trump’s campaign has long used immigration as its not-so-subtle Southern strategy: to associate an already vulnerable out-group with crime. More accurately, Trump attacks “crime,” a free-floating signifier for a host of (often unspecified) bad things done by bad people, with very little connection to the law or the American criminal legal system. “Crime is through the roof, and you haven’t seen the migrant crime yet,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin in early September. “It started, and it’s vicious, but you haven’t seen the extent of it yet.” In ads, Trump and the Republican National Committee have tried to tag Harris as the Biden “border czar,” responsible for “the border,” which isn’t true but has nevertheless structured the “border prosecutor” strategy of the Harris campaign.

Unintentionally or not, the Harris campaign’s border rhetoric leans into stigma against immigrants and against people caught up in the criminal punishment system. In response to a question on immigration in September’s presidential debate, Harris touted a border bill she supported, saying that “it would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States. I know there are so many families watching tonight who have been personally affected by the surge of fentanyl in our country. That bill would have put more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking in guns, drugs, and human beings.” Fentanyl might be an illicit substance moving across the border, but the people moving it are not recent or unauthorized immigrants. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said that “the vast, vast majority” of fentanyl coming into the United States is “smuggled through the ports of entry and tractor-trailer trucks and passenger vehicles”—that is, through legal crossings—and the U.S. Sentencing Commission has said that 86.4 percent of fentanyl trafficking offenses (between September 2022 and September 2023) were committed by U.S. citizens. But the way Harris conflated the fatal overdoses involving fentanyl with “immigration” and “the border” can end up reinforcing the talking points about immigrants, fentanyl, and “drug cartels” coming from J.D. Vance.

These criminal offenses seem selected to communicate a simple message: Harris only goes after the worst kinds of crime. While some voters may have been critical of her judgment as a prosecutor, such as when her office concealed misconduct by a technician at the crime lab they used, now Harris is emphasizing her record prosecuting “transnational criminal organizations who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings,” as she said in her first major interview, and as she repeated at the debate. In the past, she has spoken at sex-trafficking events about having visited what she said were tunnels at the border used for human trafficking—even as she also emphasized that, as attorney general, she learned that the vast majority of people trafficked for sex in California were born there. But she still talks about “the border” and human traffickers in tandem. As when she invokes having prosecuted “predators who abused women,” the way Harris talks about trafficking helps reinforce her image as a defender of women. The crime she fights, her campaign signals, is such a righteous crusade that no one is supposed to question the way it is fought.

The fentanyl and sex-trafficking talk draws on tropes that Republicans have exploited, such as Vance spreading misinformation about immigrants and fentanyl overdose deaths, or Trump tying immigrants to sex trafficking in the most grotesque terms. “Can you imagine you have this small little community; all of a sudden you have 20,000 illegals in your community. Nobody knows where they come from,” Trump said at a rally in September. “I’m angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.” Nearly a decade of right-wing conspiracy theories about sex trafficking color the way people will hear Harris touting her record on human trafficking and the border. Some of those conspiracy theories even blame Harris for sex trafficking.

Harris the “border-state prosecutor” is a response to this rhetoric. If she is critical of Trump on the border at all, it is that he is not tough enough. But that also compromises her ability to speak as forcefully about Trump’s hateful anti-immigrant propaganda. In September’s debate, Harris warned viewers that Trump would resort to “a bunch of lies, grievances, and name-calling.” But when Trump then used the debate to spread anti-immigrant propaganda about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating neighbors’ cats and dogs, Harris did not take the opportunity to refute or denounce that lie. Nor, at any other point in the debate, did she actually acknowledge these immigrant communities and the troubles they face.

When asked directly about Springfield a few days later by interviewers convened through the National Associate of Black Journalists, Harris said Trump was “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old.” She linked them back to Trump’s own history. “This is not new in terms of where it’s coming from and whether it is refusing to rent to people, rent to Black families; whether it is taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times against five innocent Black and Latino teenagers, the Central Park Five, calling for their execution, whether it is referring to the first Black President of the United States with a lie.” But mostly, she talked about the impact of Trump’s lies not on the Haitian immigrant community but generally on children, on “a whole community put in fear,” and on police. “Look, you say you care about law enforcement,” Harris said, “law enforcement resources, being put into this because of these serious threats that are being issued against a community that is living a productive good life before this happened.” She did not use the words “Haiti,” “Haitian,” or “immigrant” when addressing those harmed by these lies. But she did talk about cops.