Read Ron Brownstein’s new column in full HERE featuring Vanessa Cárdenas quote: “It is a missed opportunity for [Democrats] not to lean more into the consequences of this mass-deportation slogan.”
Washington, DC — In a new column for The Atlantic, “Kamala Harris’s Muted Message on Mass Deportation,” leading political writer Ron Brownstein analyzes Kamala Harris’ immigration campaign message in the lead-up to a critical Univision town hall tonight with undecided Latino voters from Nevada, exploring whether her campaign should aim to make Donald Trump’s proposed unsparing mass deportations even more toxic in the homestretch of this election cycle.
Quoted in the article, America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas, says:
“We are in the last four weeks of the election, and she needs to be really clear about showing the contrast … It is a missed opportunity for [Democrats] not to lean more into the consequences of this mass-deportation slogan.”
The full Brownstein piece is available here, and key excerpts are copied below:
“As the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, veers into open xenophobia, Vice President Kamala Harris faces a crucial decision about how to respond when she appears today on Univision, the giant Spanish-language television network. Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the past few weeks have grown both sweeping and vitriolic: He is blaming migrants for a lengthening list of problems, even as he describes them in more dehumanizing and openly racist language.
…Harris so far has responded to this Trump onslaught cautiously, and in a tone more of sorrow than of anger. She has often labeled Trump as divisive in general terms. But when talking about immigration, she has focused mostly on presenting herself as tough on border security. She has almost entirely avoided any direct discussion of Trump’s most militant immigration ideas—particularly his proposal to carry out the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants.
But Harris will very likely face pressure to offer a more frontal response to Trump’s mass-deportation plan in a town hall she’s holding with Univision in Nevada. With most polls still showing Trump making gains among Latinos since 2020, many Democratic activists and interest groups focused on that community believe that a more forceful rejoinder from Harris to Trump’s intensification of his anti-immigrant rhetoric can’t come too soon.
‘We are in the last four weeks of the election, and she needs to be really clear about showing the contrast,’ Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. ‘It is a missed opportunity for [Democrats] not to lean more into the consequences of this mass-deportation slogan.’
…Some immigrant-rights activists and Democratic strategists believe that Harris is so focused on proving her strength on the border that she has become reluctant to criticize almost any element of Trump’s immigration agenda, out of concern that doing so would support his jackhammer portrayal of her as soft on the issue. This debate among Democrats about Harris’s approach to immigration is part of a larger internal conversation that is quietly gathering momentum. Some senior party operatives are privately expressing concern that Harris is spending too much time trying to reassure voters about her own credentials, and not enough making a pointed case against a possible second Trump term.
…Harris has coupled these promises of tougher enforcement with the traditional Democratic promise to ‘create, at long last, a pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants who have been here for years,’ as she put it in Arizona last month during a set-piece speech on immigration. Yet she has almost completely avoided discussing Trump’s mass-deportation plan.
Implicitly, Harris’s agenda rejects any such scheme, because the longtime residents for whom she would provide a path to legalization are among those Trump would deport. Apart from a passing reference in a speech last month to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, however, she has not explicitly criticized the Trump plan; nor has Harris discussed at any length how the proposal would disrupt immigrant communities and harm the economy.
… Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Latino voters, says surveys show that support for mass deportation plummets among not only Latinos but also other voters when ‘people learn that Trump’s plans are to deport [undocumented] people who have been living and working here for decades.’ So Trump is holding his elevated Latino support despite that opposition to mass deportation, Odio told me, in large part because most Latinos ‘don’t actually believe any of this stuff is going to happen’; they expect that the courts, Congress, or business groups would prevent him from pursuing widespread removals.
Odio, the senior vice president for research at the polling firm Equis, believes that Harris has run an effective campaign to regain much of Biden’s lost ground among Latino voters, but he thinks she could benefit from more forcefully targeting Trump’s enforcement agenda, including mass deportation and his refusal to rule out again separating migrant children from their parents at the border. (Given that nearly 4 million U.S.-citizen children have at least one undocumented parent, Trump’s deportation agenda could be said to amount to a mass family-separation policy as well.) ‘There has been such a desire to tamp down the border debate [that] there’s been less of an ability to pivot to other parts of the immigration debate that could be helpful,’ Odio told me. Even conservative Latinos who moved toward Trump, he notes, overwhelmingly opposed his family-separation policies in an Equis post-2020 election survey.”
