Harris Walks Fine Line on Immigration at Univision Town Hall

The woman was weeping as she told Vice President Kamala Harris about her mother, who she said died six weeks ago without having ever achieved legal status in the United States.

“My question for you is, what are your plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?” Ivett Castillo asked at Ms. Harris’s first voter town hall as the Democratic nominee, an event hosted by Univision for undecided Hispanic voters.

In her answer, Ms. Harris strove to connect, gently urging Ms. Castillo to “remember your mother as she lived.” But the vice president’s response also underscored how much her hard-line immigration message has focused on enforcement rather than reform, as former President Donald J. Trump uses the border to paint Ms. Harris as a weak and ineffective leader.

While Ms. Harris called the nation’s immigration system “broken” and pointed out that the first bill proposed by the Biden-Harris administration would have created an earned pathway to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants, she quickly turned to the topic of the southern border — and condemned Mr. Trump for helping kill a bill that would have devoted more resources to securing it.

“Real leadership is about solving the problems on behalf of the people,” she said at the town hall, which was held in Las Vegas and will be broadcast at 10 p.m. Eastern time. Many questions were asked in Spanish and translated for her. Hispanic voters could help decide the election, but Ms. Harris’s support among them is lagging.

On Thursday, she also faced intense and emotional questions on health care and the economy, giving her a chance to display a greater degree of empathy and humanity than in the more choreographed interviews she has recently given. Much of the conversation centered on themes that Democratic presidential candidates have used to appeal to Latino voters for decades, including promises to stimulate small businesses, lower costs for families and create more legal pathways for undocumented workers.

But Ms. Harris also took sharp jabs at Mr. Trump, whom she described as a “sore loser” who had directed a “violent mob” against Congress. She denounced his profession to be “a dictator on Day 1” and called for the preservation of democracy and abortion rights, underscoring the stakes of the election and her party’s recognition that Latino voters are not a monolithic bloc with a narrow set of interests.

“This is an extraordinary time,” she said, her voice rising. “This is not a debate about trickle-down economic theory. It’s literally about, Do we support a democracy and the Constitution of the United States?”

Mr. Trump is set to appear in his own Univision town hall on Oct. 16.

Hispanic voters could play a crucial role in November, particularly in the two Southwestern battleground states: Nevada, where roughly 1 in 5 voters are Hispanic; and Arizona, where roughly 1 in 4 are. President Biden won both states in 2020.

But polls show Ms. Harris with less support from Hispanic voters than Mr. Biden carried four years ago. In Arizona, Ms. Harris is polling at 49 percent among Hispanic voters, compared with 41 percent for Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll last month. Roughly 60 percent of Hispanic voters in Arizona backed Mr. Biden in 2020.

Mr. Trump is leading Ms. Harris in Arizona overall, while Ms. Harris maintains a narrow edge in Nevada, Times polling averages show. Ms. Harris could lose both states and still carve a path to the White House if she were to hold onto the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the race is vanishingly close.

Her campaign has nevertheless continued to aggressively court Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada, pouring money into TV, digital and radio ads in English and Spanish, and deploying staff members and volunteers to knock on doors. On Thursday evening, Ms. Harris held a get-out-the-vote rally outside Phoenix.

There, she criticized Mr. Trump for threatening to undo the Affordable Care Act, and got raucous applause when she mentioned how the late Senator John McCain, a longtime Arizona Republican, had cast a decisive vote in 2017 thwarting efforts by Mr. Trump and Republicans to repeal it.

At the edges of the rally, Carmen Garza, 49, who works in insurance, leaned against a wall to wipe the sweat off her face as she reflected on how own family reflected the broader divides among Arizona’s Latinos.

Her parents were Mexican American farmworkers and were dedicated Democrats, but she said her brother was leery of Ms. Harris. Ms. Garza has tried to talk up Ms. Harris’s proposals to expand tax breaks for first-time startup businesses or have Medicare cover in-home care for older people. But he has been unmoved.

“He was like, ‘I did better when Trump was in office,’” she said.

Ms. Harris is struggling in particular among Hispanic men, polls show. On Wednesday, the Harris-Walz camp introduced “Hombres con Harris,” or “Men with Harris,” a series of events focused on health care and the economy and aimed at swaying Hispanic men. Last month in Las Vegas, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Ms. Harris’s campaign manager, and campaign surrogates attended a popular boxing match between Canelo Álvarez and Edgar Berlanga.

As in her other appeals — in advertisements and at events — Ms. Harris underscored her personal story as the daughter of immigrants who worked her way up to some of the highest offices in the United States at the Univision town hall.

And she did seek to balance her tougher message on immigration with promises to expand and improve legal pathways for undocumented immigrants and Dreamers, or people brought into the country illegally as children.

“So our Dreamers — this is again a very big example of what the price it is to pay for our broken immigration system,” she said, describing the group of immigrants as friends, classmates, business leaders and military officers.

Still, she once again remained silent on her past promise to use the power of the presidency to unilaterally give them a way to citizenship.

Mike Noble, a pollster who works in Arizona and Nevada, said that Ms. Harris’s decision to appear at the Univision town hall was significant. He described Hispanic voters as the largest swing group in the region: “It is the most movable and the most sizable — the opportunity and the threat for the two major parties.”

In Arizona, the top two issues for Latino voters have been the economy and immigration. In Nevada, home to a more socially liberal and transient population of hotel and casino service workers, the top issues have tended to be the economy, abortion rights and tips, according to Mr. Noble’s polling firm. Both Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump have proposed to exempt tips from federal taxes.

“Latinos are going to have an outsized influence in this election,” said Representative Robert Garcia of California, who attended the town hall and is an ally of Ms. Harris. “The margins are so tight.”

There was one question that seemed to stump Ms. Harris on Thursday and cast her as less than nimble on her feet.

After an audience member asked her to name “three virtues” possessed by Mr. Trump, she instead attacked him for using “belittling language” before mustering up one positive quality, his love for his family.

She then seemed to run out of steam, saying she had met Mr. Trump just once — on the debate stage last month — and “didn’t really know him, to be honest.”

“So I don’t really have that much more to offer you,” she concluded.