Kamala Harris is visiting the border and endorsing tougher measures. The Biden administration will soon announce a toughening of its asylum access restrictions.

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Developments

Vice President Kamala Harris is to pay her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since becoming the Democratic candidate for president. She will be in Douglas, Arizona, today, where she is scheduled to meet with CBP personnel at the port of entry and give a campaign speech.

Recent polls have shown Harris narrowly trailing Republican opponent Donald Trump in Arizona, a “battleground state” where competition for electoral votes is tight.

An unnamed senior campaign official told The Hill that Harris plans to “reject the false choice between securing the border and creating an immigration system that is safe, orderly and humane—arguing we must do both to protect our country’s security and enduring legacy as a nation of immigrants.”

Media reports indicate that Harris plans to attack Donald Trump for urging Republican members of Congress to defeat a compromise border-security bill that failed in the Senate in February. Harris will repeat a promise to sign a reintroduced “Border Act” if it reaches her desk. That bill included some common-sense border and migration provisions, like adding capacity at ports of entry and in the asylum system. But it also included harder-line measures like increasing detention beds and denying much access to asylum during busy periods.

A version of the asylum-denial provision is now in place, pending court challenges, under an early-June Biden administration proclamation and rule.

“Anything she says tomorrow, you know is a fraud because she was the worst in history at protecting our country,” Trump said in remarks yesterday in New York. “She should go back to the White House and tell the president to close the border.” The New York Times noted that after beginning with about 10 minutes of border content, Trump “appeared to grow bored” with his prepared remarks and veered off into other topics.

As early as Monday, CBS News and the New York Times revealed, the Biden administration plans to announce a toughening of its June rule banning asylum between border ports of entry at busy times.

The rule shuts down asylum access for those who cross the border without inspection whenever Border Patrol apprehensions, not counting unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries, average over 2,500 people per day for a week. It would restore asylum access after a weekly average drops below 1,500 per day, not counting unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries. (In August, it was about 1,870 per day.)

The administration’s likely adjustments would put a restoration of asylum further out of reach. Border Patrol apprehensions would have to fall below an average of 1,500 per day for 4 weeks—not 1 week—and unaccompanied children would count toward the total.

Texas’s attorney-general, Ken Paxton (R), is further broadening his legal campaign against non-profits in the state that serve migrants. Paxton has opened an investigation of the El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which represents asylum seekers and advocates for migrants’ rights. That makes at least five migrants rights defense organizations or shelters targeted this year.

Las Americas and the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) responded yesterday with a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to block Paxton. “We’re witnessing a disturbing pattern in Texas in which immigrant legal services and voting rights are under a coordinated siege by the Attorney General under the guise of protecting voter integrity,” said TCRP’s Rochelle Garza.

The Washington Post noted that Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), the Democratic challenger to ultraconservative Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) re-election bid, has, like Harris, pivoted to tougher talk on the border and migration.

In the Darién Gap, migrants from Venezuela interviewed by Agénce France Presse say that they are migrating out of fear amid increased repression after authorities declared that the nation’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, won re-election on July 28. The Venezuelan government provided no proof to back up this claim.

Border Patrol agents found 72 migrants whom smugglers were keeping in a storage shed in south El Paso.

Analyses and Feature Stories

Human Rights Watch denounced disturbing recent incidents in Eagle Pass, Texas: Texas National Guard personnel continue to fire pepper-spray projectiles at migrants, including families with children, attempting to cross the Rio Grande. Soldiers are using force even though their targets are unarmed, posing no threat, and separated from them by concertina-wire barriers.

The New York Review of Books covered two recent volumes about the border and migration, John Washington’s The Case for Open Borders and Lauren Markham’s A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.

“Immigration is a blessing the U.S. needs to nurture and manage,” wrote Andrés Marínez of Arizona State University at Time. “But our shared politicized narratives on the subject are veering so dangerously off course that a serious contender for the presidency can pass off talk of deporting millions of hardworking immigrants as a sensible proposal.”

Of migrants in their care shortly after arriving at the border in Arizona, Doctors Without Borders noted that most are suffering stress that is “not post-traumatic. They are still in a kind of traumatic reaction, which is a physical and mental state. And they should be. They are hyper alert, and ready to run at any moment after what many of them have gone through.”

Regardless of the election outcome, “the issue of immigration seems set to remain a political cudgel,” Aimee Santillán of the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute told the National Catholic Reporter.

On the Right