Vice President Kamala Harris will visit the border town of Douglas, Arizona, on Friday as she looks to bolster her image as a candidate who can handle immigration.
Harris has received endorsements from the mayors of some of the largest towns on the Arizona–Mexico border, including Bisbee, Nogales, Somerton, and San Luis, Arizona. She will visit Douglas as part of a campaign stop in Arizona.
Her stop in Douglas may be one of the quieter places on the southern border. The town of 16,000 does not have the capacity to accommodate mass migration and has seen less than other border cities in recent years.
“I want to set the record straight on something here,” Bruce Whetten, a reporter for the Herald Review who has covered Douglas for more than 30 years, told ABC 15 Arizona. “They’re not here to stay. This is a stopping point for them, and we know that. They’re here at most 24-36 hours and then they’re on their way.
“We’re not seeing them wander the streets. We’re not having the violence they have in other locations,” he continued, noting that drugs have always been a problem, but it has worsened with the introduction of fentanyl.
When President Joe Biden lifted Title 42, the COVID-19 emergency measure invoked by former President Donald Trump to keep migrants out, Douglas braced for a mass influx of asylum-seekers. On the first day, the town received just one couple with a toddler as the crisis residents were warned about did not materialize.
“Mostly what you see in the national news really doesn’t happen here in Douglas,” Mayor Donald Huish told Cronkite News on Thursday. “I believe the vice president wants to get a broader look at what’s going on at the border.”
Douglas residents have previously expressed their dismay with politicians visiting their town for political gain rather than real solutions. Douglas native Felipe Bernal has expressed frustration around the rhetoric surrounding “border towns.”
“It really bothers me to hear Washington talk about the ‘border towns,’ you know,” Bernal told ABC 15 Arizona in August. “These politicians that say, ‘Oh we need to control the border. We need to,’ Hey, they have never ever lived close to a border. So, how can they know what’s going on in the border?”
Huish expressed frustration at the lack of federal funding and legislative action. He said there is a strain on local law enforcement officials due to staffing shortages and increased responsibilities. Huish was supportive of Gov. Katie Hobbs’s (D-AZ) veto of a bill that would have made it a state crime for noncitizens to enter Arizona through Mexico at a location that is not a designated port of entry.
“It would place an undue burden on our local law enforcement,” Huish told NewsNation. “We’re understaffed right now. It’s difficult to hire law enforcement at this point in time, and so it would increase that burden on them.”
He also expressed frustration with the bipartisan border bill, which fell apart after Trump told Senate Republicans not to move forward with it. Huish urged lawmakers to overcome political divisiveness on immigration and prioritize the need for federal assistance.
“It leaves us at dire straits,” Huish said. “I was particularly impressed with the border bill that came out of the Senate. It had some aspects of it that would have helped immensely. It’s apparent that the current political environment of Washington, D.C., doesn’t want to deal with it.”
Violent crime in Douglas is well below the national and state averages.
In the first four months of 2024, there were more than 250,000 migrant apprehensions across the Tucson, Arizona, sector, which includes Douglas, according to statistics from the U.S. Border Patrol.
Still, drug smuggling remains a problem in Douglas, as is the case in Arizona’s five other border crossings. In 2018, officers intercepted $1.1 million worth of heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl through this port of entry.
In January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents arrested a 19-year-old man attempting to smuggle nearly 500,000 fentanyl pills into the country.
Still, “it’s not to the level of what we’re seeing in other parts of the nation,” the mayor said.
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Republicans have frequently attacked Harris as a failed “border czar” during a period when illegal immigration skyrocketed, although her official assignment from President Joe Biden was to look into root causes of migration from Central America to the United States. Her campaign hopes this visit to Douglas will put her on the offensive on an issue that does not poll well for her.
According to a recent New Scripps News/Ipsos poll, 44% of respondents believe Trump will do a better job handling immigration, compared to 34% who said Harris would do a better job. Arizona voters also viewed Trump as the better candidate on immigration with 41% support to Harris’s 28%, but 21% did not believe either candidate would handle immigration well.