Harris Turns to Her Experience Fighting Cross-Border Crime in California

As California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris prioritized the fight against traffickers of drugs and people. It’s a part of her biography she hasn’t always talked about.

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Vice President Kamala Harris’s surrogates and allies say her past experience combating cross-border crime sheds light on how she might address challenges related to the southern border today.

As Vice President Kamala Harris vows to crack down on illegal immigration at the nation’s southern border, she has played up her experience as California’s attorney general pursuing criminal groups that traffic drugs, guns and people across the United States and Mexico.

“I was the top law enforcement officer of the biggest state of the country, California — that is also a border state,” she said on Thursday at a town hall in Nevada. “I took on transnational criminal organizations.”

Ms. Harris’s surrogates and allies say her push on transnational crime sheds light on how she might address challenges at the border. The issue is at the forefront of voters’ concerns after illegal border crossings surged during President Biden’s first years in office, and as former President Donald J. Trump and his allies fuel falsehoods about immigrant gangs and conflate immigration with crime.

Now, her record prosecuting cross-border crime is being scrutinized by Democrats and social justice activists and distorted by Republicans. And some of the tactics she had embraced she is no longer willing to say she supports. Here is what she did as California’s attorney general, why it matters and why it could have implications should she win in November.

A shift in strategy

Ms. Harris made tackling transnational crime a priority in her campaign for attorney general of California in 2010 and during her six years in the role.

From the beginning, she sought to change how law enforcement agencies would combat criminal activity along interstate corridors. She brought together federal officials and state attorneys general to strategize, and convened multiagency task forces to work with counterparts in Mexico and across Latin America. They took on cases that led to the arrests of larger players in the drug trade and seizures of greater quantities of drugs and other illicit goods.

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