Former President Donald Trump painted a grim picture Thursday of what the U.S.-Mexico border would appear to be if Vice President Kamala Harris were elected president.
Trump visited Arizona just hours before Harris was scheduled to simply accept her party's presidential nomination on the last night of the 12 months. Democratic National Convention.
During an hour-long press conference, Trump falsely claimed that Harris supported an open border policy and repeated false figures about what number of immigrants had entered the United States during Biden and Harris's tenure.
“If [Harris] “If she gets the possibility, she’s going to let over 100 million illegal immigrants into our country,” Trump claimed. “Our country can be overrun and principally it would not be a rustic.”
Trump also described several gruesome crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants.
A central part of Trump's campaign strategy is to stoke voters' concerns about illegal immigrants and the southern border – and then promise to respond to those fears.
Meanwhile, Harris and the Democrats continue to work on developing a unified platform on immigration and border security.
That work was on display this week at the Democratic National Convention, where speakers tried to walk a fine line between compassion for immigrants and the tougher border control measures that polls show voters support.
“Let's be clear: The border is broken,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday night. “This nation built by immigrants is a rare and delightful thing.”
Suozzi is a freshman House member who ran on a warmongering border security platform, winning a Republican-held seat in the New York House of Representatives for a Republican.
Migrants crossing the border have skyrocketed in the past year, overwhelming cities across the country. While state governments rushed to find housing outside of major cities, local politicians quickly realized they lacked the infrastructure to accommodate the incoming immigrants.
At the party convention in Chicago, Democrats tried to shift the blame onto Trump, accusing him of pressuring his Republican allies in Congress to kill a Senate border security bill earlier this year that would have provided more funding for border security.
“Trump killed this bill,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said Wednesday, a statement Harris repeated later in the week in her acceptance speech.
Murphy was at the forefront when the border talks failed, and he accused Trump of deliberately sabotaging the negotiations because the ongoing refugee crisis served his political goals.
“Hate and division are Trump’s oxygen,” Murphy said.
After the Senate border policy bill failed, Biden signaled that he would use his executive powers to do some of the things the failed bill would have done.
In June, Biden signed an executive order tightening immigration restrictions, but it faced fierce opposition from progressive immigration groups.
Biden's move should send a clear message to border-concerned voters: He would not shy away from tough measures on the border.
This harder line was clearly evident in some speeches at the Democratic Party Convention.
“When Donald Trump involves Texas, he can be standing next to law enforcement officials in the very same uniforms as me. He just isn’t there to assist us,” Texas County Sheriff Javier Salazar said on Wednesday. [Harris] has been fighting against border crime for years.”
“When the traffickers didn’t stop, she put them in prison,” he added.
Migrant crossings have declined as a result of Biden's executive action, and the broader impacts are already visible on the ground.
Earlier this year, for example, the governor of Texas said: Greg Abbott sent buses stuffed with migrants from his state to redistribute the overwhelming influx of immigrants.
But in response to data obtained by NBC News, the Republican governor stopped sending migrants north by bus in July.
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