Why playing it safe on immigration and crime could be a big risk for Harris

Analysis by Ronald Brownstein, CNN

(CNN) — Vice President Kamala Harris has so far largely avoided confronting Donald Trump on some of his most racially inflammatory policy proposals – even as she continues to underperform among the Hispanic and Black voters who could face the harshest consequences from the former president’s plans.

Not calling out his ideas for the mass deportation of undocumented migrants, for example, or the pressure he wants to put on local governments to adopt tougher policing tactics is a cautious strategy that may reflect the unease in some Democratic circles about bringing attention to the volatile issues of immigration and crime. But it could also deny her some of her best potential tools to pry back some of the Black and Hispanic voters among whom most polls show Trump is still running better than in 2020.

Since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, Trump has constantly attempted to portray her as weak on immigration and crime. The former California attorney general has sought to rebut those charges by emphasizing her toughness on those questions – especially her prosecutorial background in a border state – and highlighting Trump’s torpedoing of a bipartisan border deal. But the real question for many of the groups working on these issues is whether she tries to turn the tables by portraying Trump’s solutions to these problems as extreme, impractical and racially divisive.

Gary Segura, a pollster who works with UnidosUS, a leading Hispanic advocacy group that has endorsed Harris, said that the vice president was missing an opportunity by avoiding a confrontation with Trump over his mass deportation plans, for example. “We have done focus groups and polling both for Unidos and for other organizations [and] overwhelmingly mass deportation is not a popular position,” among Hispanics, Segura told reporters last week while releasing a new Unidos national survey of Hispanic voters. “But it is not particularly well known. Many of the people we speak to believe he will do it if he can, but they just don’t actually believe that he can pull that off.”

On both immigration and crime, Trump this year is running on an agenda significantly more aggressive than he proposed either in 2020 or 2016.

In effect, Trump is gambling that he can energize his base of culturally conservative White voters with these hardline ideas, while also attracting an increased share of non-White voters on other issues, starting with the economy. The reluctance of the Harris campaign, and the leading Democratic interest groups, to confront Trump more directly over his proposals is increasing the odds that gamble will pay off.

Among the immigration issues that Harris and liberal groups supporting her have almost completely ignored are Trump’s pledge to implement a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants; his call to end birthright citizenship for the children of those immigrants; and his refusal to rule out reviving his policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border (which his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, on Friday also suggested could be reprised).

In his Wisconsin campaign rally on Saturday, Trump warned that deporting at least some of the migrants he intends to target “will be a bloody story.”

Democrats have also said little about Trump’s suite of aggressive crime policy proposals. These including mandating that local police departments adopt “stop and frisk” tactics as a condition of receiving federal law enforcement aid, while simultaneously passing federal legislation making it more difficult to sue police officers for misconduct. (He touted those ideas again last Friday when receiving the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police.) Trump has also talked openly about deploying the National Guard into high-crime cities over the objections of local governors and mayors.

These programs’ cumulative impact on minority communities could be enormous. Trump has repeatedly promised to pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he has phrased it on social media. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly discussed plans to build a massive deportation force composed of federal law enforcement officials from a wide array of agencies, local police and sheriff’s departments, and even National Guard troops provided by sympathetic red state governors, to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Undocumented migrants, Miller continued, would then be transferred to massive internment camps – “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas” – from which they would returned to their home countries through near-constant flights.

Deportations at even a fraction of the pace Trump is promising could be enormously disruptive to the Hispanic community and the broader economy.

Michael Ettlinger, the founding director of the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy, wrote last week in the Boston Globe that mass deportations of undocumented immigrants could remove from the workforce 22% of all farmworkers, 15% of construction workers, and 8% of both manufacturing and service workers, including child care providers. Economic forecasters at groups such as Moody’s Analytics and Goldman Sachs have cited that potential disruption to the labor force as a key factor in their projections that Trump’s agenda would reignite inflation and slow domestic growth.

Simultaneously, widespread deportations could touch millions of Hispanics beyond those here illegally. According to unpublished new research provided to CNN, Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Research Center, estimates that about 15 million Hispanics, or roughly one-fourth of the entire US Hispanic population, live in so called “mixed status” families, where at least some members are undocumented. Those 15 million people divide roughly equally between those who are here illegally and those who are legal residents – including nearly 4 million US-born citizen children of undocumented parents, Passel calculates.

The implications of Trump’s criminal justice agenda are nearly as sweeping. In one of his “Agenda 47” videos outlining his second-term plans, Trump said he “will require local law enforcement agencies receiving [federal] grants to return to proven policing measures such as stop-and-frisk.” That refers to the policy, instituted most aggressively in New York City under Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, of stopping large numbers of people to search for drugs or guns; eventually a federal judge ruled the program violated the rights of minorities, who were disproportionately targeted in the stops, and the city abandoned the policy. Black and Hispanic young men between the ages of 14-24 accounted for over 40% of all those stopped under the policy, even though they account for less than 5% of city residents, according to a report by the NYCLU.

Advocates for police reform say that requiring cities to implement some version of the stop-and-frisk approach while also passing federal legislation strengthening the “qualified immunity,” which protects police against lawsuits over misconduct (as Trump has also promised), would inevitably result in many more arrests of young Black and brown men each year. “If that is something cities take on across the country … there will be millions of [more] police stops,” mostly of younger Black and Latino men, said Ed Chung, vice-president for initiatives of Vera Action, a group that advocates for policing reform. “And if the numbers hold true to what the New York Police Department experienced, 90% of those will be stops for no reason.”

Yet despite these potentially massive impacts, Trump’s immigration and criminal justice ideas have received relatively little attention in the campaign from anyone – the media, liberal interest groups or the Harris campaign.

Harris did not mention the threat of mass deportation in either Phoenix or Las Vegas, two cities with very large Hispanic populations, when she appeared in them on her initial campaign swing with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. And while, in all her stump speeches, she alludes to the prospect that Trump’s proposed tariffs will inflate prices, she pointedly omits any mention of the mass deportation program that economists consider an equal inflationary risk. On Friday, Harris also chose not to mention mass deportation during a radio interview with Univision, when the host asked her to summarize her argument to undecided Hispanic voters. Nor has Harris criticized Trump’s plans to pressure cities to implement tougher policing policies, even when she’s appeared in cities with large Black populations, such as Philadelphia, Atlanta and Savannah.

The Harris campaign, based on my conversations with people familiar with its thinking, has not engaged in these fights largely because it believes that the remaining minority voters up for grabs are mostly motivated by the same economic concerns as the White electorate. It wants Harris to be seen primarily as focusing on those bread-and-butter concerns. To the extent Democrats want to highlight some of Trump’s more extreme ideas, the campaign believes that work could be done more usefully either by surrogates, paid advertising, or groups in the broader Democratic universe – rather than Harris personally engaging the former president, according to the sources familiar with the campaign’s strategy.

Still a growing number of Democratic activists focused on rallying Black and Latino voters are clearly eager to hear Harris and other party leaders challenge the Trump agenda more directly.

“There is a way in which those [crime and immigration] issues in particular are also about bigger things,” said Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, a group working to mobilize Black voters for Harris and Democrats. “They are about values. There is a way to talk about them that is fundamentally about who are we and who do we want to be as nation, which she is really good at. People are quite tired of being the worst version of ourselves, and I think that contrast is really important to make.”

Segura, the pollster who works with UnidosUS, said that while a measurable segment of the Hispanic electorate supports hardline approaches on immigration they tend to be “the voters who lean in the GOP direction in the first place.” As a result, he added, “I don’t see a lot of risk” for Harris to push back against Trump’s deportation plans “particularly in targeted advertising to Hispanic voters.”

Tom Wong, founding director of the US Immigration Policy Center at the University of California at San Diego, has tested public opinion on mass deportation for another immigration advocacy group, America’s Voice. Wong said that while mass deportation initially draws substantial public backing, support for the idea dwindles both among Hispanics and the broader population when people are informed that such a program could sweep up people who have been in the US for years without breaking the law and may have US citizen children.

“Once we can put a human face on the idea of an undocumented immigrant being rounded up and deported, then the general public takes a step back,” Wong said.

A national poll by Marquette Law School in Wisconsin earlier this year confirmed that dynamic. A May survey found that when part of the sample was asked, “Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries?” over three-fifths said they did. But that support flipped to majority opposition among another group of respondents who were asked if they would support deportations even of people who “have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record.”

Raising the prospect of the detention camps that would be required for mass deportation may also depress support for the idea. New polling released last week by the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute found that over three-fifths of all Americans opposed deporting all undocumented immigrants “even if it takes setting up encampments guarded by the US military.” Fully 7-in-10 Hispanics said they opposed that idea, according to unpublished results provided to CNN.

Not as much public polling is available on the specifics of Trump’s policing agenda. But Daniela Gilbert, director of Vera’s Redefining Public Safety initiative, says that the group’s private surveys consistently show widespread public backing for a comprehensive agenda of providing support to police departments, but also insisting on accountability for police misconduct and promoting alternative approaches to community safety, such as greater mental health intervention and drug treatment. That’s largely the mix of policies the Biden administration has advanced, Gilbert noted.

“Our polling data really shows that Harris will leave votes on the table if her campaign is silent on the need for better and more accountable policing,” Gilbert said. “Talking about those policies can garner more support, whether or not that is framed in direct response to Trump’s outlandish policies, or really focused on the track record she has in advocating for greater accountability.”

Anthony Baber, director of communications and culture at Detroit Action, a grassroots group that mobilizes working-class and younger voters of color in that city, points to another reason for Harris to amplify the volume on these issues. He said her emphasis on her prosecutorial background has caused some of the voters of color the group is trying to reach to question the distance between her and Trump on issues relating to criminal justice. Harris, Baber believes, needs to more clearly separate herself from Trump on that front.

“Trump is kind of benefiting from the perception of Harris as the super cop,” Baber said. “I think there’s a lot of people who see [her history as a prosecutor] and wonder if [she] is a more compassionate candidate when it comes to criminal justice reform, because it is not coming through as clearly as a difference between these two candidates.”

Harris nonetheless has plenty of reasons to minimize her exchanges with Trump around immigration and crime. Some Democratic strategists agree with the campaign assessment she has a better chance to reach the non-White voters now considering Trump by emphasizing economic messages rather than the threat he could pose to them on these issues.

Polls also consistently show that many more voters trust Trump than Harris on immigration – he led her by double-digits on the issue in all six of the swing states in CNN’s survey last week. She’s narrowed Biden’s overall deficit to Trump on trust to handle crime. But among White voters, she trailed Trump by at least 22 points on immigration in all of the states CNN polled except Michigan and Wisconsin, where she trailed more narrowly; on crime, she trailed him by at least 17 points with Whites everywhere except those two states, where again she trailed more narrowly.

Given those deficits, some of the activists focused on Black and Hispanic voters believe the party has concluded that any time spent talking about immigration or crime is a net negative for them – even if they are trying to focus attention on Trump’s controversial responses. To the extent Harris and other Democrats are addressing these issues at all, many of these activists believe, they are emphasizing a message of toughness rather than equity. “I think that Democrats have been scared away [from] talking about immigration because of the record numbers of arrivals at the southern border,” said Wong, alluding to the high number of border crossings late last year that fed GOP attacks on the Biden administration but have since markedly decreased. Chung of Vera Action similarly says that the increase in crime around the pandemic – which has since largely receded – has discouraged not only Democratic office-holders but the broader constellation of progressive groups from more forcefully pushing alternatives to hardline policing policies.

Harris has also repeatedly signaled that she does not want to focus the campaign on issues that revolve around race – as she did when she immediately shut down any discussion of Trump’s attempt to question her racial identity during her recent interview with Dana Bash on CNN.

“I think a lot of issues that could be really resonant among historically Democratic constituencies, like younger African Americans and Hispanics, they seem to be worried more alienating about more conservative Whites in places like Pennsylvania,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Against all of these reasons for Harris to sidestep these fights, there remains the stubborn reality that, despite her own gains, she still typically polls below Biden’s 2020 level of support among Hispanic and Black voters. And many of those voters might recoil from these Trump policies on crime and immigration if they heard more about them.

Shropshire of BlackPAC said that in her group’s polling, the hardline approaches to policing and deportation that Trump is touting “do not align with the values of any of the voters that he is trying to move” in the Black community. “What he is hoping is that the Black voters who he is [courting] don’t see that stuff,” Shropshire said.

Like the campaign advisers I spoke with, Shropshire adds, “It should not just be the onus of the vice president to call this out. There is an entire Democratic ecosystem that should be addressing these things.”

Given Harris’ persistent need to recover more ground with Hispanic and Latino voters, the riskiest choice for her and her allies on immigration and crime might be to continue to play it safe.

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