It might not seem possible for former President Donald Trump to ratchet up his inflammatory rhetoric any further. But during the first and perhaps only debate between him and Vice President Kamala Harris as candidates in the 2024 Presidential election, he managed to do exactly that.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” he now infamously said. “They’re eating the cats. . . .they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.”
Fact-checkers quickly clarified that no, immigrants are not eating the cats and dogs of the good people of Springfield, Ohio. Trump’s dubious claim originated with social media posts claiming Haitian immigrants were going after local ducks and house cats. The debate moment has since been endlessly memed, fueling a narrative that only Donald Trump and his running mate Ohio Senator J.D. Vance can save the country–and their pets—from violent immigrants.
But while Kamala Harris might not have spread this kind of hate during the debate, she didn’t counter it, either. Instead of pushing for fairer policies for immigrants—or condemning Trump’s hateful language and the harm that it can cause immigrant communities—she belittled Trump himself and touted her own border security plans. The episode demonstrates why many immigrants across the United States are apprehensive about Harris’s promises—especially when it comes to the border.
“Everyone is so excited about the fact that she’s Black and a daughter of immigrants,” says Alix Dick, a Mexican filmmaker living in Los Angeles and a co-founder of La Cuenta, a newsletter that explores the experiences of undocumented immigrants living in the United States—including herself.
“I wish I could celebrate all of these things freely, but I can’t,” she continues. “Everything she has been talking about has to do with border control, and nobody is talking about immigration reform.”
Even though Harris routinely brings up the fact that she is the proud daughter of a South Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she has so far promised little to improve the lives of immigrant communities across the United States. Instead, she has touted her experience as a prosecutor as proof that she will be “tough” on the border, promising to crack down on fentanyl and gang violence by hiring more border patrol agents and continuing construction on the border wall. Her rhetoric symbolizes a significant shift that mirrors the far right and leaves immigrants and immigration advocates without a meaningful alternative to Trump.
“The Vice President and the V.P. candidate, Tim Walz, have a real opportunity to lean in on what immigration has meant to this country and how it continues to strengthen our economy,” Congressmember Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat, tells The Progressive, pointing out that undocumented immigrants contribute close to $100 billion every year to the U.S. economy in taxes. “It is time to stop apologizing for immigration,” she adds. “We should be thanking them for their contribution, instead.”
Harris’s record on immigration is mixed at best. While she used her position as a San Francisco district attorney to go after an unlicensed contractor who was exploiting undocumented immigrants, she also supported a city policy that required law enforcement to turn over undocumented juveniles to federal immigration authorities—regardless of whether or not they had been convicted of a crime. She is credited with helping Mexican immigrant Sergio Garcia become the first undocumented licensed attorney in U.S. history. As President, Joe Biden tapped her to work with Central American governments to address the “root causes” of migration. Yet one of Harris’s first actions as Vice President was to travel to Guatemala and tell a group of would-be migrants to stay out of the United States. “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders,” she said during the visit, adding, “If you come to our border, you will be turned back.”
Trump and Vance have since cast Harris as a “failed border czar” for not doing enough to stop migration as Vice President. But rather than combat this narrative with just policy proposals for immigrants and asylum seekers, Harris is doubling down on her promises to secure the border.
Harris’s rhetoric symbolizes a significant shift that mirrors the far right and leaves immigrants and immigration advocates without a meaningful alternative to Trump.
In an ideal world, Ramirez says that Harris and Walz would propose a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for decades. She points out that work permits would also provide better opportunities and meaningful protections for undocumented immigrants and their families, allowing them to stay in the country without living in fear of being deported and separated from their loved ones.
While Biden ran on a promise to undo the worst of Trump’s hostile immigration policies—including, but not limited to, reuniting families that had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border and ending the infamous Muslim ban—he has not proven to be an advocate for immigrants and asylum seekers. Shortly after assuming office, he deported 4,000 Haitians who were fleeing political turmoil and persecution back to Haiti, and continued Obama’s legacy as the “deporter-in-chief.” As President, Biden has deported more than 1.1 million immigrants and asylum seekers—a figure that puts him on track to match the 1.5 million deportations overseen by Trump.
Biden has also gutted the asylum system. Long after the COVID-19 pandemic-era travel restrictions had been removed, Trump’s notorious Title 42 policy—which used public health concerns to justify turning migrants away before they had even had a chance to make their asylum claim—remained in place, turning away numerous people who came to the U.S. border seeking protection. More than half of the 900,000 migrants who arrived in the United States in the first five months of 2024 came from Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and Colombia. Many of them were fleeing violent cartels and economic turmoil back home.
While Title 42 has since been struck down, Biden signed an Executive Order that effectively shut down the U.S.-Mexico border to anyone who arrived with the intention of seeking asylum—with the excuse that it was meant to control the numbers of people crossing the border. Still, it has all but sealed off the United States to people in need of protection. Since Biden took office, the combined budget of both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has increased to nearly $30 billion per year, the highest it has been in U.S. history.
“The Biden-Harris Administration’s rhetoric and policy mirrors that of the right,” explains Stacy Suh, program director at Detention Watch Network. “He has essentially enacted policies that shut down the border, severely restricting people’s access to asylum protections.” She adds that the administration also recently announced that the Department of Justice will soon start prosecuting migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“It has larger ramifications for immigrant communities who are already in the United States,” she says, adding that there has also been an increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and the number of people in immigration detention.
With more people in immigration detention, the already deplorable conditions inside of detention centers have deteriorated. Detainees report regular food poisoning, and going for twelve hours at a time without water. A program that allowed them free access to phones to keep in touch with their loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic has since been rolled back.
“It affects people’s ability to advocate [for] themselves and stay connected to their loved ones,” Suh says, pointing out that this affects their ability to communicate with both lawyers and family members. “It severely impacts their mental and emotional well-being.”
Just before he dropped out of the race, Biden announced a program that would allow the undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens to apply for a green card without having to leave the country, and risk not being allowed back into the United States. While it will undoubtedly change the lives of half a million people in mixed-status families, it is widely seen as a small gesture that does little for the undocumented community as a whole.
“Our imagination is so small that we’ve assumed that the only way to ‘gain’ or access citizenship is through love—or this kind of performance of love,” says filmmaker Dick, explaining that, even at its best, the green card program only benefits the spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens.
“Maybe we could imagine a system where people could gain citizenship through work permits,” she continues, which would extend these rights and protections to all undocumented communities. Aside from marrying a U.S. citizen, the only other way for an undocumented immigrant to regularize their status is to be the victim of a crime.
Now Harris is in a position where she could offer Dick and eleven million people like her a pathway to citizenship and implement welcoming policies for refugees seeking asylum at the border. Instead, she is promising that one of her first actions as President will be to revive a bipartisan border bill that allocates millions toward completing the border wall and expanding the number of Border Patrol agents.
“These policies don’t just hurt immigrants; they hurt everyone,” Suh argues. “We could be investing in housing or health care or education that benefits everyone instead of investing billions in harsher border enforcement, detention, and deportation.”
While the bipartisan border bill that was scuttled in February also included increasing the number of asylum case officers and immigration lawyers to clear backlogs and facilitate people being granted asylum, it did not include any kind of amnesty or meaningful path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
“As Democrats, we have not done the best job at actually leaning into the narrative of the contributions of immigrants,” Ramirez says.
“We all know the most important issue, no matter where you are, is the economy,” she adds. “So, turn it around; make it about the economy. Kamala Harris is from the state of California, one of the strongest economies in the world. That economy wouldn’t be what it is if it weren’t for the farmworkers. It wouldn’t be what it was if it wasn’t for the hospitality or manufacturing industries.”
A recent study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that undocumented immigrants contribute nearly $100 billion in taxes to the U.S. economy every year. If immigrants were given work permits that allowed them to access better jobs with higher wages, this number would be even higher.
Instead, more than $247 million was spent in the first six months of 2024 on campaign advertisements that mention immigration, largely painting the border as a dangerous, lawless place that needs to be controlled. While 90 percent of these ads support Republican candidates, at least three dozen have supported Democratic candidates—the most infamous of which has been a recent ad in which Harris lambasted Trump for urging a vote against the bipartisan border bill and pitched herself as the pick to bolster national security.
“A bunch of racist people are going to vote for Trump, and there’s not really anything that we can do about that,” says Antero Garcia, an associate professor at Stanford University and Dick’s co-editor at La Cuenta.
“I think a much more dangerous narrative is the idea that there is this dangerous threat on the other side of the border, and that there are dangerous people in our communities,” he adds, noting the Harris campaign’s complete embrace of this position. “It creates a level of distrust that makes people not want to change that narrative.”
Perhaps most ironic is that Harris could be using her platform to criticize Team Trump for a litany of inhumane immigration policies—including Vance recently mobilizing his base by promising to “start” with deporting one million undocumented immigrants. Instead, she is playing politics and shoving immigrants under the bus.