Vice President Kamala Harris denounced many of the Trump administration’s immigration policies but has endorsed President Joe Biden’s decisions to restore some of them, such as restrictions on asylum-seekers, as illegal border crossings have reached record levels. She has tried to address root causes of migration by securing private funding for development projects in Latin America.
Former President Donald Trump enacted sweeping anti-immigration policies when he was president, including separating migrant children from their parents. If elected again, he wants to round up millions of immigrants in the country illegally and detain them in camps before deporting them en masse.
Illegal immigration
Harris
Harris has taken a relatively tough stance on immigration recently, emphasizing her support for a bipartisan proposal that would have hired thousands of new border security agents and asylum officers and closed the border if crossings reached an average of more than 5,000 migrants a day over a week.
The deal died in Congress after Trump came out against it, but Harris has pledged to work to get it passed if elected president. Her campaign has also indicated that she would maintain a policy that Biden enacted this year through executive action, barring asylum applications from most people who cross the border illegally.
She approached the issue differently during her first presidential campaign in 2019, when she argued that it should not be a crime to enter the United States without authorization and called for reexamining the role of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. (Decriminalizing border crossings was a popular position among candidates in the Democratic primary that year.)
She supports DACA, the Obama-era program formally called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, under which people brought to the United States illegally as children are protected from being deported. Because judges have ruled against the program, including one ruling last year, Harris urged Congress in June to pass legislation that would permanently protect DACA beneficiaries, commonly known as Dreamers.
In 2019, she called for using executive action to extend DACA-like protections to other groups as well, including immigrants whose children are citizens or legal permanent residents. Her campaign did not say whether she still supported that.
One of her mandates as vice president has been to address the root causes of migration from Latin America, such as poverty and violence. She has mainly sought to do this through a program called the Partnership for Central America, which has secured more than $5 billion in pledges from private companies to support Central American communities.
The program has focused on El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Border encounters with migrants from those countries have fallen sharply, though migration from other countries soared over much of the same period.
Trump
If reelected, Trump is planning a deportation operation that he has called the largest in American history.
He plans to round up immigrants in the country illegally and detain them in camps while they await deportation, rely on a form of expulsion that doesn’t involve due process hearings, and deputize local police officers and National Guard troops from Republican-led states to carry out immigration raids. During a rally in September, he said that expelling some migrants would be “a bloody story.”
Trump said to Time magazine in April that he might deploy the military against migrants both along the border and in nonborder states, claiming that a law that forbids the use of the military for domestic law enforcement would not apply because people who are in the U.S. illegally “aren’t civilians.”
He also wants to revoke birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to immigrants in the country illegally, which overwhelming legal consensus holds to be guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.
All of this would be an escalation from his first term, during which he separated thousands of migrant children from their parents and held them in crowded, unsanitary facilities. During a CNN event last year, he did not rule out reinstating family separation.
Trump has repeatedly dehumanized migrants, including saying on multiple occasions that they are “poisoning the blood” of the country and calling some of them “animals” and “not people, in my opinion.”
Asylum
Harris
Harris endorsed an executive order that Biden issued in June, closing the border to asylum-seekers when the seven-day daily average for illegal entries hits 2,500. The most restrictive border policy enacted by a modern Democratic president, it is similar to a 2018 Trump policy that was blocked by a federal judge and faces a similar challenge.
She also wants to revive a bipartisan border-security deal that would have made it harder to claim asylum while also including a right to counsel for certain applicants, including unaccompanied children 13 and under.
Trump
The Trump administration forced asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings, leading to the development of squalid refugee camps along the border. He has said he wants to reinstate that policy if elected again.
In 2018, he suspended asylum rights for people who entered the country illegally, a policy that was blocked by a federal judge.
His administration used the coronavirus pandemic to lay the legal groundwork for denying asylum-seekers entry into the United States, something he had expressed interest in but had been unable to do beforehand. The emergency public health measure he invoked, Title 42, allowed the government to quickly expel migrants who crossed the border.
He wants to reinstate Title 42 if elected again, this time based on claims that migrants carry diseases like tuberculosis rather than the coronavirus.
Legal immigration
Harris
Harris has said in various forums that she supports “an earned pathway to citizenship” for immigrants in the country illegally. Her campaign did not respond to a request for details.
The bipartisan border-security deal from earlier this year that she has endorsed would have added 250,000 family- and employment-based visas over five years and ensured green-card eligibility for the children of immigrants who are in the country on H-1B visas for highly skilled workers. It also would have enacted measures to reduce illegal border crossings.
Trump
Trump tried, but Congress did not agree, to greatly reduce legal immigration by limiting U.S. citizens’ ability to bring in relatives and by increasing education and skill requirements.
In 2019, he began denying permanent residency to immigrants deemed likely to require public assistance, a rule that disproportionately affected people from Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. He also significantly limited H-1B visas for skilled workers.
If elected again, he has called for revoking the legal status of people — including Afghan refugees — who have been allowed into the country for humanitarian reasons, as well as revoking the student visas of people whom he called “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.”
He said at rallies in October that he would put in place “strong ideological screening” for visa applicants, barring anyone who was “communist, Marxist or fascist”; who sympathized with “radical Islamic terrorists and extremists”; who wanted “to abolish the state of Israel”; or who did not “like our religion.” (The U.S. has no state religion, and the First Amendment doesn’t allow one.)
His campaign also said he would expand a program from his first term to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants whom he determined to be “criminals, terrorists and immigration cheats.”
