Vice President Kamala Harris defended her immigration policy during a town hall with undecided Latino voters on Thursday, emphasizing the Biden administration's approach amid growing criticism from both the right and left on this touchy subject.
Hosted by Spanish language network Univision in Las Vegas, Harris brought up the bipartisan border security bill, which she said was supported by "one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate" and then sabotaged by former President Donald Trump.
Both Trump his running mate JD Vance have used the immigration issue as a cornerstone of their campaign speeches in which they've blamed undocumented immigrants for a rise in drug trafficking – particularly the synthetic opioid fentanyl – across the U.S.-Mexico border.
"Not only is Comrade Kamala allowing illegal aliens to stampede across our border, but then it was announced about a year ago that they're actually flying them in. Nobody knew that they were secretly flying in hundreds of thousands of people, some of the worst murderers and terrorists you've ever seen," Trump said in mid-September.
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Vance Takes Up The Border Bashing
Vance tends to get very specific about Harris and drug smuggling at the southern border. At a Faith & Freedom Coalition event in Atlanta in September, Vance accused Harris of failing to stop cannabis and fentanyl disguised as Nerds candy from coming across the border. He told the conference that he was invited into a sheriff's evidence room and saw "every drug you can possibly imagine," including "bags and bags of marijuana," pressed fentanyl pills and meth.
Despite the Trump/Vance insistence that immigrants, and by extension Harris, are responsible for flooding the U.S. with drugs, data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission tells a different story: 86.4% of those sentenced for fentanyl trafficking are U.S. citizens and the majority of drug-related arrests involve Americans, not undocumented migrants.
Key Voting Demographics: Latinos, Women
Harris's town hall comes as Democrats struggle to hang on to Latino support – a key voting bloc as the largest minority group in the U.S., forming nearly 20% of the total population. This translates to an estimated 36 million eligible Latino voters, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump's Univision town hall in Florida was postponed because of Hurricane Milton. Though Fox News announced in a press release Friday that Trump will hold a town hall next week focused specifically on women's issues – another voting bloc that polls show he's struggled to reach.
