If Donald Trump’s campaign wants to make illegal immigration a campaign issue, Vice President Kamala Harris is more than happy to have that fight.
Harris opened her appearance before a crowd of 10,000 in Atlanta on Tuesday by taking aim at Trump’s record — criminal and otherwise — and calling out the ex-president for killing the bipartisan immigration bill that was crafted by one of the nation’s most conservative senators earlier this year.
In a reference to her background as a prosecutor, she told rally goers she had taken on “perpetrators of all kinds,” including “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers,” and “cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”
“So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type — I know the type, and I have been dealing with people like him my entire career,” she said, leading the crowd to respond with chants of “lock him up,” referring to the ex-president’s 34 felony convictions;
Harris also said she would “proudly” compare her record against Trump’s “any day of the week,” including on the subject of immigration, citing her work as the attorney general of California, which shares a border with Mexico.
“I walked underground tunnels between the United States and Mexico on that border with law enforcement officers. 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,” she said.
By contrast, Harris said Trump “has been talking a big game about securing our border” but “ does not walk the walk.”
“Our administration worked on the most significant border security bill in decades. Some of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, DC supported the bill, even the Border Patrol endorsed it,” she said as she recalled how the bill had been “all set to pass” before Trump “directed his allies in the Senate to vote it down.”
“He tanked, tanked the bipartisan deal because he thought it would help him win an election,” she said, adding that she would push a Democratic congress to enact the same bill to law when she is in the White House as president.
In response, the crowd roared with approval.
The vice president’s appearance at the raucous Atlanta rally demonstrated the massive shift in culture and enthusiasm that has swept through the Democratic Party in the nine days since President Biden shocked the world by announcing that he would become the first American president to stand down from seeking a second term since Lyndon Johnson did so amid the upheaval from the Vietnam War in 1968.
Biden’s campaign appearances were usually daytime affairs hosted by labor unions or other Democratic-leaning groups, or nighttime fundraisers with audiences limited to smaller groups of donors and video footage tightly controlled by his campaign apparatus.
But since becoming the party’s de facto nominee last week, Harris has returned to the packed rallies that characterized Democratic campaigns before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the 2020 election cycle, with star-studded guest lists reminiscent of Barack Obama’s first campaign for the presidency in 2008.
By the time she took the stage at the Georgia State Convocation Center, the stands had been packed to the rafters with a crowd campaign officials estimated at more than 10,000 attendees.
They were warmed up by Peach State Democratic mainstays, including former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Georgia’s two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Rev Raphael Warnock.
But even those politicians’ national profiles compared to another of the warm-up acts who entertained the crowd in the minutes before Harris took to the stage: Grammy-winning rapper Megan Thee Stallion.
The rapper performed four songs: “Girls in the Hood,” “Mamushi,” “Body,” and “Savage” as she exhorted the crowd to vote for Harris.
Before she began “Body,” she told them Harris would protect their reproductive rights.
“Now I know my ladies in the crowd love their bodies — and if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for,” she said.
She also called Harris “our future president” and told the crowd they were “about to make history with the first female president — the first black female president.”
“Let’s get this done, honey,” she added.
After Thee Stallion performed to cheers from rally goers, Atlanta-area rapper Quavo praised Harris for her work on addressing gun violence, calling the vice president someone who “always stands on business.”
But the cheers both musicians received paled in comparison to the ovation Harris got when she took the stage to Beyonce’s “Freedom” and launched into her remarks.
In what has become a standard part of her stump speech, she warned that Trump wants to implement a “Project 2025” agenda that would “cut Social Security and Medicare,” as well as “give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations” and “gut the Affordable Care Act.”
“America has tried these failed policies before, and we are not going back.,” she said.
“We’re not going back, because ours is a fight for the future, and it is a fight for freedom. Across our nation, we are witnessing a full on assault on hard fought, hard won freedoms and rights, the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to live without fear of bigotry and hate, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride, the freedom to learn and acknowledge our true and full history. And the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do,” she said.
But Harris also challenged Trump on his recent decision to waffle on whether to debate her at the September 10 presidential debate set to air on ABC.
She said Trump’s decision was because “the momentum in this race is shifting” and called the move a “sign that Donald Trump is feeling it.”
“Here’s the funny thing about that. So he won’t debate, but he and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me,” she added, drawing laughs when she asked if the crowd finds her opponents “just plain weird.”
Speaking to Trump directly, Harris challenged him to show up and confront her.
“Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage, because as the saying goes: If you got something to say, you should say it to my face.”