The Border Cold War: Election Tension and the Bipartisan Consensus
The Border Cold War: Election Tension and the Bipartisan Consensus
As Democrats campaign to the right of Trump on the border, a cold war bubbles up from below.
A black-and-white deportation bus pulls into the DeConcini port of entry in Nogales, Arizona. I am crossing into Mexico in a vehicle, and watch as the families get off the bus, leaving the caged area behind the driver. The buses are mobile jail cells, constantly traveling southern Arizona’s highways. A Border Patrol agent stands guard as parents try to corral their small children and line up behind a metal, nondescript gate. Both the parents and children look disheveled and disoriented, and one child softly cries in her mother’s arms. They are about to join the more than 4 million people kicked out of the United States since Joe Biden took office in 2021.
This scene played out one day after Kamala Harris released her first campaign ad, in which she promises to hire more Border Patrol agents, bolster enforcement technology, and ramp up prosecutions. The ad stresses that Trump blocked the hiring of more agents and the use of new technology, and then adds, tongue in cheek, that he is the one getting prosecuted. The point is that Harris is going to be stronger on border enforcement than Trump. “He talks a big game,” Harris said at an Arizona rally, “but he does not walk the walk.”
In another campaign ad released last week, Harris emphasizes her previous role as a prosecutor in a border state. She touts that as vice president, “she backed the toughest border control bill in decades,” referring to the February border bill that put $15 billion toward ICE and CBP, which included funding for border wall construction, more surveillance technology, further DNA extraction of border crossers, ground and maritime drone systems. It amounted to the “largest appropriation of funds for immigration detention custody and surveillance operations in ICE’s history,” as noted by the Detention Watch Network. When elected president, Harris vows, she will sign this bill into law.
The ad ends with a banger: “Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.”
Harris’s border ads come amid tremendous excitement for her campaign and the beginnings of a knock-down, drag-out fight with Donald Trump, who calls Harris a “failed border czar,” a title never held by the vice president but nevertheless repeated endlessly by the MAGA constituency—like the “open borders” narrative used against Biden. A mere month ago, the Democrats looked like they were dead in the water, but now they are revitalized and brimming with optimism, if their rallies and polls are any indication. On the border, however, their offering is the same heavy-handed enforcement they campaigned against in 2020. That year, Biden promised he would not build one more foot of border wall, and that we would not put kids in cages. He even went as far to announce a 100-day deportation moratorium (later shot down by a judge) and committed to a “humane” border policy. Now the rhetoric has shifted. The Democrats’ 2024 campaign strategy is to run to the right of Trump on immigration, as became evident long before Harris took over. As was revealed in 2020, however, there is a large sector of the Democratic base concerned with border, immigration policy, and human rights. It is this base that might just have the power to persuade the new presidential candidate, who comes from a family of migrants, to take a different approach.
One problem is that it is impossible to run to the right of Trump on the border. While it is true that the former president did verbally reject the enforcement-heavy border bill in February (as Harris put it, “He tanked the bill”), Trump responded by proposing an even more intense scenario: the mass roundup and deportation of 15 to 20 million undocumented people. He wasn’t rejecting the border bill as much as conjuring an even bigger threat. And so began the border cold war. Now each side tries to outdo the other, accusing it of not doing enough. Any talk of humane policies has become lost in the rhetorical battle.
For his part, Trump is as obsessive about the border as he’s ever been. At the infamous June debate with Biden, Trump brought up the border 28 times, including when he was supposed to answer questions about other subjects, like democracy, child care, and addiction. At the very second of the assassination attempt in July, Trump was talking about the border. When the shot rang out, he was pointing to a chart (“the chart that saved my life”) about immigration apprehensions, and making the false claim that they were the lowest in “recorded history” at the end of his term. (He was pointing to April 2020, during the onset of the pandemic, eight months before he would leave office.)
At this point, it’s clear that no matter the winner in November, the scenario playing out in front of me at the Nogales crossing will continue. There are no television cameras capturing the parents’ tired, mortified faces and their squirming children as they line up behind the Border Patrol agent. Two Mexican immigration agents await on the other side of the gate. There is a banality to the whole scene. It’s what they do all day, all week, all year. And it appears that it’s what they will do for years to come. As a Politico headline puts it, “Trump Says He Wants to Deport Millions. He’ll Have a Hard Time Removing More People Than Biden Has.” According to the article, the Biden administration “has kicked out millions more migrants than Trump ever managed to,” and Trump removed 1.5 million during his four years. The article contends that it would be almost impossible for Trump to overtake Biden’s “blistering pace,” which has pushed “the country’s deportation infrastructure to its limit.” But given what we know of Trump’s first term in office, the family separation in 2018, and the implementation of the Remain in Mexico program and Title 42, he just might attempt the mass deportation, and if so, it will be in front of the cameras and accompanied by the former president’s special type of xenophobic rhetoric. He will make it a spectacle.
When Trump took office in 2017, he inherited the largest border and immigration budget in U.S. history, at $20 billion (CBP and ICE budgets combined). If he wins the election this year, Trump will again inherit an enforcement and deportation machine. There is a $30 billion budget for 2024 (the highest ever), which will presumably be similar or more in 2025, if the decades-long trend of incrementally increasing budgets continues. The budgets are passed on, as are contracts issued to private companies, year to year, from president to president, even from opposing parties. Border enforcement is bipartisan and has been so especially since the Bill Clinton administration implemented the prevention-through-deterrence strategy in 1994.
Yet there are some major differences between the parties, the most significant of which pertains to the concerns of their bases. Trump, always hyperaware of what his base wants and how they poll, will continue to amp up border enforcement and receive standing ovations when he mentions it. The Democratic base, however, is different. During the Trump presidency, a huge sector found border enforcement to be authoritarian and abhorrent.
Back in Mexico, after watching the deportation of the families at the port of entry, I visit a migrant shelter called Casa de Misericordia, where people can stay as they process their asylum claims. It takes eight to 10 months just to get an appointment. But now, with stringent asylum restrictions ordered into place by Biden in June, there could be an even longer wait. Harris says she will maintain Biden’s asylum crackdown into her presidency, which would have been unthinkable in 2020.
On the one hand, the excitement around Harris’s candidacy is understandable, since she has given Democrats hope that they might hold the White House, a dire prospect only a short time ago. On the other hand, there has been very little critique, let alone pushback by the Democratic base about her border plan. It is possible to, however, both support Harris and pressure her to shift the border stance, insist to her campaign that going to the right of Trump is not a good idea. Otherwise, for the foreseeable future, all we’ll have is an intensifying border cold war—and its predictable and all too often tragic consequences.
Excellent article, and very alarming.
Excellent piece. Thank you for outing the Democrat’s plans to focus on enforcement. We don’t need more agents on the border and $30 billion is shameful.