Kamala Harris Should Reframe Immigration as a Gun Control Issue

Kamala Harris is achieving what many people long believed was impossible: making Donald Trump look weak on the U.S.-Mexico border. By sustaining and strengthening her immigration counteroffensive, she can turn her opponent’s main weapon into his Achilles’ heel.

On July 30, her campaign released an ad contrasting their actions on the border, citing Harris’s support for more Border Patrol agents and technology to block fentanyl from entering the country, while observing that Trump derailed funding for all of that. “Harris prosecuted transnational gang members and got them sentenced to prison,” the narrator intones. “Trump is trying to avoid being sentenced to prison.” At a rally in Atlanta, Harris touted her record as California’s attorney general, when she went after cartels and human traffickers at the border. “I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” she said.

This strategy is long overdue from the Democratic Party, which has tended to dither in the face of Trump’s border fearmongering. But Harris can do more to seize control of the immigration narrative. She can co-opt Trump’s signature issue by talking about border control—in terms of gun control.

Immigrants aren’t coming en masse from “prisons” and “insane asylums,” as Trump claims. They’re fleeing violence in their home countries spurred by the largely unfettered flow of U.S. firearms.

Since a 20-year-old white man and registered Republican tried to assassinate Trump with an AR-style rifle, Trump has been eager to talk about bullets. He referenced the bullets that nearly killed him 11 times in his speech at the Republican National Convention, almost as often as he used the word “invasion” to describe immigrants. He talked about bullets again a day later in Michigan, saying: “I took a bullet for democracy.” He repeatedly mentioned bullets at his July 31 rally in Pennsylvania.

So let’s talk about bullets. In the wake of his assassination attempt, Trump now falls into the same category as many of the immigrants he’s been scapegoating: survivors of underregulated guns.

An iron river of U.S. firearms has flowed south for decades, causing unprecedented levels of bloodshed across Latin America in defiance of the region’s strict gun laws. In Mexico, which has just one gun store and requires months of background checks, about 70 percent of weapons found at crime scenes have been traced to the U.S., for example. More than half a million U.S. guns are trafficked into Mexico annually, according to that country’s estimates. The Mexican government is even suing U.S. gun manufacturers for $10 billion, accusing them of knowingly flooding the country with weapons. Although undocumented immigrants come from an increasing array of nations, the majority still come from Latin America, with the largest number of immigrants coming from Mexico, followed by Venezuela.

We can’t have border control without gun control. If Harris and every major Democrat beat the drum about this as often as the Republican Party spews hate against immigrants, Trump could lose arguably his most potent ammunition.

As California’s top prosecutor, Harris noted the importance of going after gun traffickers in a 2014 report, “Gangs Beyond Borders: California and the Fight Against Transnational Organized Crime.” It observed that California’s large ports of entry made it an attractive target for cartels to “move weapons obtained in other states via straw buyers to Mexico.” These weapons also end up in the black market through a private-sale U.S. loophole that lets people sell firearms without background checks at gun shows and online. Other times, licensed gun dealers sell directly to drug traffickers. Like fentanyl, guns are predominantly trafficked through ports of entry, and almost always by U.S. citizens.

The Biden-Harris administration tried to close the private-sale loophole, but a Republican lawsuit stopped them. The bipartisan border deal that Trump blocked would have also made ports of entry more secure with 100 new inspection machines to detect illicit cargo passing through them. Trump and his party have done nothing but sabotage attempts to make progress on the continental gun problem.

Nevertheless, Biden and Harris have taken historic actions to disrupt weapons trafficking, and thus to reduce the violence that is displacing people across the Americas. As vice president, Harris worked with Mexico to re-initiate high-level dialogue about the trafficking of weapons and drugs, as part of her effort to address the root causes of immigration (why Trump and his allies incorrectly describe her as being the “border czar”). Last year, she announced a $100-million initiative to reduce weapons trafficking to the Caribbean. The administration also created a new anti-cartel weapons trafficking group at the border through the Department of Justice, and is advocating for universal background checks and eliminating gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability. By depriving cartels of firepower, Harris has done more to protect Americans from fentanyl than Trump ever did.

Now is the time for Harris to prosecute Trump on his abject failures on this issue. If she talks about border control in terms of gun control, she can expose Trump as the true “failed border czar.” And she can simultaneously avoid alienating progressives because it’s less about cracking down on immigrants than about facing down cartels that force people to leave their homes. She can appeal to young voters, who are highly concerned about gun violence.

Building walls that cartels simply bypass with power tools and underground tunnels accomplishes little other than giving immigration opponents a false sense that they are keeping out people (who are fleeing poverty and violence). Harris, who walked those tunnels as California’s Attorney General, knows that better than most people. Disarming the crime syndicates that turn people into exiles would accomplish a lot more. And Harris has a long history of holding gun traffickers accountable and seizing guns from criminals.

As Republicans cast Trump as a victim of hate-mongering by the left, he continues to traffic in hate himself, repeatedly maligning immigrants as rapists and murderers even though data consistently shows that they’re less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S. The former president was literally in the middle of an anti-immigrant tirade when he was shot. If he hadn’t turned to look at his chart about border crossings, he might be dead. He said: “I owe immigration my life.”

Against expectations, Harris is projecting strength in the face of the anti-immigrant bully. As she stated, she knows his type. He’s a predator, and Harris has a strong record of taking predators’ weapons. She should keep it up. If anybody can confiscate the source of Trump’s power, it’s her.