Democratic convention says Kamala Harris will fix the border

Democrats sought to flip the script on immigration Wednesday, saying former President Donald Trump is the one who has kept it broken and Vice President Kamala Harris will fix it.

Using the party’s convention as a platform, a Texas sheriff and Democratic members of Congress blamed Mr. Trump for tanking a border bill earlier this year, saying he did it to keep the border in chaos and preserve the political issue.

Democrats vowed to pursue border security and legalization of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, if Ms. Harris wins the election.

“All Republicans have to offer is demonization and bluster,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar, Texas Democrat. “With Kamala Harris as president, we can live up to the promise of America. We can strengthen legal pathways to immigration. We can secure our borders and treat with dignity those that seek a better future within them.”

The lean-in to immigration would have been tough to imagine just eight months ago, when the southern border recorded its worst month in history. But those numbers dramatically improved since then, giving President Biden and Ms. Harris some breathing room.

Democrats on Wednesday said they can deliver both better security and the legalization that they have long promised — and failed to deliver — to immigrant rights activists.

Chief among those promises is the border bill that failed in the Senate this year.

That bill was negotiated by a Republican, a Democrat and an independent senator, with input from the White House. It would have stiffened asylum standards, hired more Border Patrol agents and allowed faster deportations when the border numbers got too high.

“Trump killed that bill and he did it because he knew if we fixed the border he’d lose his ability to divide us,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, Connecticut Democrat.

That claim about Mr. Trump is belied by House Republicans, who control the lower chamber and had declared the Senate bill dead well before Mr. Trump urged opposition to it.

Indeed, even some Democrats opposed it, and the bill never earned majority support in the Democrat-led Senate.

In the second of two votes, in May, it earned just 43 supporters, including six members of the Democratic Caucus. Among the opponents were both of California’s Democratic senators and Sen. Cory A. Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who, ironically, was serving as master of ceremonies for the Democrats’ convention Wednesday night.

Ms. Harris has said she would sign the bill.

That’s a significant reversal for her. As a senator, she compared officers at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Ku Klux Klan and suggested abolishing ICE and starting over on deportation enforcement. As vice president, she wrongly suggested Border Patrol agents had whipped Black migrants.

Mr. Biden, in his speech to the convention on Monday, touted the changing border numbers, saying there are “fewer border crossings today than when Donald Trump left office.”

He is wrong about the numbers. More than 122,000 migrants were encountered at the borders last month — the best month of Mr. Biden’s tenure. In December 2020, the last full month under Mr. Trump, the figure was just 76,200.

Under Mr. Biden, the country added roughly 4 million new immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.

Under Mr. Trump, that figure fell by about 1 million.