Latino Leaders Set Aside Their Rocky Past With Kamala Harris on Immigration

Hispanic leaders and civil-rights groups are backing the vice president, despite their clashes with the Biden administration on border policy.

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Robert Rivas, speaker of the California Assembly, helped draft a statement in 2021 that opposed Vice President Kamala Harris’s comments on immigration, but he now backs her presidential campaign.

No issue is likely to be thornier on the campaign trail for Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, than immigration. Republicans are falsely painting her as President Biden’s failed “border czar” and running ads tying her to Biden administration policies that they argue have contributed to chaos at the border.

But condemnation has also come from liberal and progressive Democrats, who along with immigrant-rights groups have faulted Ms. Harris as part of an administration that they say has ceded ground on the issue to Mr. Trump and his allies.

In one of the most striking moments in Ms. Harris’s tenure as vice president, she drew swift criticism from Latino elected officials and immigrant-rights leaders for her admonishment to the growing ranks of migrants in the summer of 2021. “Do not come,” she told them, in a news conference in Guatemala, where she was on a diplomatic tour.

Robert Rivas, a California state lawmaker, helped the Latino Legislative Caucus draft a fierce statement in opposition to those remarks, urging her and the administration not to discourage asylum seekers “from doing what they need to do to survive.”

But three years later, Mr. Rivas, now the speaker of the California Assembly, endorsed Ms. Harris within minutes of President Biden’s exit from the race on Sunday. He is one of many of those same leaders who are quickly setting aside their disputes with the White House, saying Ms. Harris is far preferable to former President Donald J. Trump.

“Trump was an absolute disaster for our country, and there’s just no comparison between the two candidates,” Mr. Rivas said, citing Mr. Trump’s punitive record against immigrants from Latin American and Muslim-majority countries.

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