Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly will travel to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona on Friday. It would mark her first visit to the border since becoming the Democratic nominee for president.
The visit underscores the importance of immigration and border security as an issue in the campaign.
The centerpiece of Harris’ border plan is enacting the bipartisan border security bill negotiated this past winter by the White House, Democrats and Senate Republicans.
“After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border. Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades,” Harris said during her speech at the Democratic National Convent in Chicago in August.
The bill would have given the president sweeping authority to restrict the right of migrants to seek asylum when the number of unlawful crossings reaches a certain level. It also would have sped up the process for screening asylum applicants and provided money to build and reinforce the border wall, and add border personnel.
“That bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now, overtime, trying to do their job,” Harris said during a presidential debate against former President Donald Trump earlier this month. “It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”
RELATED: Trump’s immigration plan includes mass deportations, restrictions on entering U.S.
But Republicans blocked the bill. According to Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, Trump urged Republicans to oppose the deal to ensure that problems at the border remained a campaign issue.
“I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law,” Harris said at the DNC.
Experts say even if Harris is elected, passage of the legislation will depend on the composition of Congress.
“The Senate border bill that the Harris campaign supports, of course, failed within the Congress and has kind of lost support over time, with many Republicans who previously supported it walking away from it,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
“We can kind of expect a stymied Congress, especially on immigration. And so it would, I think, really take a huge amount of effort to see that through Congress,” Putzel-Kavanaugh went on to say.
Harris might face the same obstacles when it comes to her other policy proposals. Like President Joe Biden, Harris signaled she wants to pair a clampdown on the border with expanding legal pathways for certain undocumented immigrants.
“We must also reform our broken immigration system and protect our Dreamers and understand we can do both, create an earned pathway to citizenship and ensure our border is secure,” Harris said at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C. last week.
Dreamers are undocumented immigrants that were brought to the U.S. as children. It has been 12 years since former President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, to allow Dreamers to live and work in the U.S. Congress has failed to approve a permanent solution.
Harris has given few details about her proposed earned pathway and whether it would be based on employment, certain nationalities or humanitarian concerns. Experts suspect it would include DACA recipients and other undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for years.
“Most of the unlawfully present population of the United States, they've not been here for two months or six months. Many have been here for years, five years, 10 years, multiple decades. On top of that, they likely would have to show that they have not had any significant criminal background and possibly enrolled in school,” said Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Republicans call Harris the “border czar,” but White House officials say her role was limited to trying to address the root causes of migration in certain Central American countries. She said those efforts led to significant investments into the region.
Spectrum News has reached out to Harris' campaign for comment on her reported visit to the border.