Comparing Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on Latin America

Although the economy traditionally dominates U.S. elections as the top issue, immigration has been at the forefront of this cycle. A June 2024 Gallup survey saw 22 percent of Americans name immigration as the country’s top problem. Trump, in particular, has seized on this issue, with immigration listed as the first issue on the Republican party platform. 

Cracking down on immigration was a cornerstone of Trump’s presidency. One of his first actions in office was his ban on migrants from mainly Muslim countries. He followed this up days later with an executive order that increased the scope of deportations in the United States, which averaged nearly 500,000 a year during his presidency.

Early on, Trump put pressure on countries in Latin America to curb migration, including by slashing aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and then pushing these countries to sign agreements that force migrants to apply for asylum within Central America. Trump also moved to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, designation to migrants from those three countries, as well as Haiti and Nicaragua. Under TPS, migrants are granted residency and work visas. A court eventually blocked the measure in 2024. On the last day of his presidency, Trump actually expanded TPS protection to include Venezuelans.

In 2018, the Trump administration began the “Migrant Protection Protocols” policy, also commonly referred to as “Remain in Mexico.” The program was used to send as many as 70,000 asylum-seekers back to Mexico to wait there for their U.S. immigration hearings. President Joe Biden eventually oversaw the repeal of the policy in June of 2022 after a judicial back-and-forth.

Toward the end of his term in 2020, Trump leveraged a public health measure from 1944 called Title 42 to block migrants from entering the country during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nearly 2 million migrants were expelled in its first two years. It was another policy that stayed in place partially through the Biden administration, only ceasing in 2023. 

In his 2024 campaign, Trump has promised to heighten his efforts to crackdown on illegal immigration to the United States. That’s centered on a mass deportation push involving either the U.S. military, the National Guard, or a new deportation force. He has said he will restore “Remain in Mexico” and Title 42.

Just a few months after his inauguration, in March 2021, President Biden tasked Harris with reducing migration to the United States. Harris’s efforts have centered on tackling the “root causes” of migration that drive people to leave their home countries. She’s helped shepherd more than $5 billion in private-sector commitments to the Northern Triangle.

In her campaign, she’s also called for immigration reform. Her website mentions creating an “earned pathway to citizenship,” but contains no details on what this process would entail. When speaking on immigration, Harris has highlighted her time as a prosecutor in California fighting transnational gangs and human traffickers, but avoided more directly confronting Trump’s policies.

During the Biden presidency, illegal border crossings have reached record levels. An average of 2 million migrants entered the United States, mostly through its Southern border with Mexico, from 2021 to 2023. The Biden administration’s deportation numbers have matched Trump’s, with 1.1 million deportations in his first three years. Polling indicates that Americans rate President Biden’s performance on border security among the lowest of any issue. 

Trump has made border control central to his pitch since his presidential announcement speech in 2015 when he promised to build a wall on Mexico’s dime. During his term, Trump spent over $15 billion in federal money on the wall, overseeing the construction of over 500 miles of infrastructure, mostly replacing or installing a second layer to miles of preexisting, smaller barriers on the border.

He pledged to go further in his 2024 campaign with a vow to “seal the border, stop the invasion and launch the largest deportation effort in American history.”

In an interview with CNN during her 2020 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris called the wall President Trump’s “medieval vanity project.” She swore: “I am not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances, and I do support border security.”

Although Harris has not spoken specifically about the wall during her 2024 presidential campaign, one of her recent television ads says she will hire thousands more border agents and highlights that she supported “the toughest border security bill in decades.” The bill in question was a bipartisan border security bill the Senate blocked in early 2024. It would have increased deportations, as well as funding for more border agents and technology. It also included $650 million for border wall construction. Trump repeatedly spoke against the bill.

In 2018, Harris, then a senator, called for the resignation of Secretary for Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, due to her oversight of Trump’s family separation policy at the border. Border security separated at least 3,900 children from their parents through a policy that allowed for adult migrants to be deported without their children.

In 2023, Mexico beat both Canada and China to become the United States’ top trading partner. Central to that relationship is the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced NAFTA, and was negotiated by President Trump in 2020. USMCA has a scheduled review  in 2026. How might the two candidates approach this process and trade with Latin America more generally? 

In his 2016 campaign, Trump was a sharp critic of NAFTA, referring to it as “the worst trade deal ever made.” In his negotiation of USMCA, Trump pushed to strengthen protections for the North American auto industry, added a section on small- and medium-sized businesses, and reduced the power of the investment settlement mechanism, which allows for the mediation of business disputes. USMCA, which Trump called “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement,” came into effect in July 2021 after Democrats supported the deal in Congress.

But despite negotiating the agreement, Trump’s support for USMCA in a second term is not guaranteed. He has remained critical of the U.S. trade deficit with its North American partners, which more than doubled since 2017 to $220 billion in 2023. Trump has spoken in his 2024 campaign about a plan to impose a 10 percent tariff on all goods imported into the United States.

He used tariffs as leverage while president. For several months  in 2018 and 2019, he placed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and Mexico. He then threatened to impose a five to 25 percent tariff on all Mexican goods in retaliation for what he saw as the country’s inaction on migration. After negotiations with Mexican officials, Trump dropped the plan.

As president, Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which in addition to Canada and Mexico, also includes Chile and Peru. 

His opponent, Kamala Harris, also opposes the TPP, a viewpoint she expressed in her 2016 Senate campaign.

In 2020, she was one of ten Senators to vote against the USCMA, and said she would have voted against NAFTA. However, unlike Trump, Harris’ opposition came from her belief that the USMCA did not go far enough on environmental and worker protection.

“I’m not a protectionist Democrat,” declared Harris in 2019. She’s come out against Trump’s proposed 10 percent global import tariff, running ads saying the tariffs would hurt consumers. Otherwise, Harris has not yet commented on her view on the review of USCMA or any potential new trade deals during her 2024 campaign. 

International responses have varied widely to Venezuela’s July 28 elections, where leader Nicolás Maduro claimed victory despite evidence of a landslide win for the now self-exiled opposition leader Edmundo González.

Two days after the election, Harris called for the full results of the election to be released and for the will of the voters to be respected. In an August letter to opposition leaders, Harris called for the military to exercise restraint on protestors and for transparency from the electoral agency.

As senator, she opposed the use of military intervention to ensure the entry of aid into Venezuela, while criticizing the repression carried out by the Maduro regime.

Trump has not made a direct statement on the election, though he did call Maduro “a dictator” in an August interview. In that same conversation, he claimed that the country’s capital, Caracas, is safe because criminals have all fled to the United States. Trump has spoken several times on the trail in 2024 about the threat he believes gangs from Venezuela pose to the United States.

As president, Trump took a hardline stance on the Maduro regime, intensifying sanctions numerous times. That included cutting off the regime from access to U.S. financial institutions, banning the purchase of Venezuelan debt, and sanctioning individuals seen as aiding Maduro allies. He also sanctioned Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, as well as businesses and individuals who helped the company.

In 2019, after Juan Guaidó assumed the role of Venezuela’s interim president, the Trump administration recognized the leader as the country’s legitimate head of state.