WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday criticized Republican Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of people living in the United States illegally. She questioned whether Trump would rely on massive raids and detention camps to implement his promise.
Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual leadership conference that the country could both find a path to citizenship for those who wanted to come while also securing the border.
“We can do both, and we must do both,” she said.
Trump, for his part, held a rally in Uniondale on Long Island, New York, while both candidates took a break from campaigning on Wednesday in the key states that are likely to decide the November 5 election.
Before heading to the suburbs, Trump visited a Bitcoin cafe in New York City. Trump has recently turned to cryptocurrency and helped launch his family’s modern cryptocurrency company on Monday night.
Harris pointed to the Trump administration’s immigration policies in her bid to gain Hispanic support.
“As we fight to lead our country to a better future, Donald Trump and his extremist allies will continue to try to set us back,” Harris said. “We all remember how they tore families apart, and now they have promised to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history.”
“Imagine what that would look like and what would happen? How is that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps? What are they talking about?” she said.
Former President Trump has promised that if elected in November he would conduct “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” but he has not provided details on how such an operation would be carried out.
Trump, who has made immigration one of his key campaign issues, has an advantage over Harris in opinion polls when it comes to who voters trust to handle the problem better.
Meanwhile, the Teamsters union refused to endorse Harris or Trump, saying neither had sufficient support among its 1.3 million members.
Harris met with a group of Teamsters on Monday. She has long courted unions and has made supporting the middle class her central political goal. Trump met with a group of Teamsters earlier this year, and their chairman Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican convention at Trump’s invitation.
Trump’s rally on Wednesday night was held in Uniondale, an area that could be crucial for Republicans to retain control of the House. His party is seeking to protect 18 Republicans in overwhelmingly Democratic congressional districts that Joe Biden won in 2020, particularly in coastal New York and California, and is going on the offensive to challenge Democrats elsewhere.
On Long Island in particular, one of the most closely watched races is between first-term Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito and Democrat Laura Gillen. D’Esposito is a former New York City police detective who won in 2022 in a district that Biden won by about 15 percentage points in 2020.
On Tuesday, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Republicans have “a real chance to win New York for the first time in many decades.” In the same post, Trump also promised that he would “take back SALT” and hinted that he would repeal a cap on state and local tax deductions that was part of a tax cut law he signed in 2017.
The so-called SALT cap has resulted in higher tax bills for many residents of New York, New Jersey, California and other states with high costs of living and high taxes and is a major campaign issue in those states, particularly among New York Republicans in districts won by Biden.
With her speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, Harris spent the second day in a row addressing groups of voters who are considered key figures in the Democratic Party.
On Tuesday, she gave an interview to members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia. She condemned Trump’s rhetoric and said voters should make sure he “doesn’t get that microphone again.” She has trips planned to Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin later in the week.
Trump is trying to get back into his campaign rhythm after Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt that struck him while he was playing golf in Florida. He traveled to Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday and does not appear to have changed his plans for upcoming trips to the nation’s capital and North Carolina later this week.
His running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, held an event in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Wednesday.
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You can reach Meg Kinnard at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP
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Kinnard reported from Houston and Colvin from Uniondale, N.Y. Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Washington and Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.
