ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
On a three-day campaign sweep through Nevada and Arizona, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance repeatedly pinned what he called the failures of the Biden administration on Vice President Harris. NPR's Ben Giles has been keeping track of Vance's travels through the borderlands, and he is with us now. Hey, Ben.
BEN GILES, BYLINE: Hello.
SHAPIRO: So he started his Southwest tour in Nevada with stops in Reno and Henderson on Tuesday. What was his message right out of the gate to voters there?
GILES: So Vance accused Harris of being culpable for record-setting numbers of border crossings earlier in the Biden administration, though we should note unlawful border crossings have dropped significantly in recent months. They've reached lows not seen since 2020. Vance also hammered that message home, though, at a campaign rally in the Phoenix suburbs last night and again along the Arizona-Mexico border in Cochise County earlier this morning, where he met with Border Patrol officials and local law enforcement.
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JD VANCE: It's hard to believe until you see it with your own eyes just how bad the policies of the Kamala Harris administration have been when it comes to the Southern border.
GILES: Vance repeated that particular phrase, the Harris administration, multiple times at the border this morning as the Trump campaign tries to shine a light on Harris now that she's the leading candidate to be the Democratic presidential nominee.
SHAPIRO: And did Vance describe what the Trump administration would do differently on the border from Biden and Harris?
GILES: Yeah. So Vance, as well as Paul Perez, the president of the Border Patrol's union, said the policies Trump implemented in his first term like Remain in Mexico and construction of the border wall were working and would work again. Here's Perez.
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PAUL PEREZ: This can be stopped. There is a playbook. President Trump had it, and he still has it. They can make it happen.
GILES: At the border, Vance also pointed to unused materials sitting alongside the fence and promised to resume construction if Trump's elected.
SHAPIRO: How does the Harris campaign respond to these claims? What's her message for voters like those who are down there at the border?
GILES: So Harris has tried to remind people of her roots as a prosecutor. She was the attorney general of a border state, California. In fact, the first trip she took after she took office in 2011 was a tour of a drug-smuggling tunnel in Imperial County along the California-Mexico border. We heard some of this from Harris at a rally in Georgia earlier this week.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.
GILES: Nonetheless, Republicans view this as a weakness for the Harris campaign, and you can expect they'll make more trips to the border over the next three months to attack Harris.
SHAPIRO: You have been following the presidential campaigns in the Southwest. How big of an issue is the border for voters in states like Arizona and Nevada?
GILES: In certain border communities, like here in Cochise County, this is the issue that matters to them in November. Enforcement at the border is also literally going to be on the ballot in November. Republican state lawmakers here referred a measure to the ballot that, like the law in Texas, would authorize local law enforcement to make arrests for illegal border crossings. Republicans have used that as a cudgel to hammer Biden and now Harris for what they call a crisis at the border.
The Harris campaign has picked up on a Biden campaign strategy to fight back by focusing on the failed border security bill that Biden had agreed to sign earlier this year. Harris, like Biden, blames Trump for discouraging Republicans in Congress from voting for that bill.
SHAPIRO: That's NPR's Ben Giles in Arizona. Thank you.
GILES: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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