A section of the border wall east of Douglas in 2020. (Photo by Jerry Glaser, U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
WASHINGTON – Vice President Kamala Harris will visit Douglas on Friday, her first border visit as the Democratic presidential nominee and only her second as vice president.
In June 2021, she spent over 4 hours in El Paso, far from the migrant crisis hotpots at the time.
Douglas is also not the focus of Republican attacks about the current administration’s record on border security, which could help explain why her campaign picked it.
“Mostly what you see in the national news really doesn’t happen here in Douglas,” Mayor Donald Huish said Thursday in a Zoom interview. “I believe the vice president wants to get a broader look at what’s going on at the border.”
Border security is a political liability for Harris. Douglas, four hours drive from Phoenix, doesn’t neatly fit into the GOP narrative about migrant invasions and an open border.
Violent crime is well below the national and state averages in Douglas. There haven’t been scenes of migrants massed on the other side of a fence, or filling the streets after being released into the United States.
“There is no serious criminal threat from the migrant community here,” said Dwight Metzger, a member of DouglaPrieta Works, the U.S. side of a binational group dedicated to helping poor neighborhoods with the city across the border, Agua Prieta, Mexico.
Republican politicians have traveled to the border throughout President Joe Biden’s term to spotlight rising numbers of asylum seekers. Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, stopped at a remote border area near Sierra Vista on Aug. 1.
Like Douglas, population about 16,000, Sierra Vista is also in Cochise County, a Republican stronghold that Trump won 56%-35% over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 58%-39% against Biden in 2020.
Congressional Republicans have repeatedly visited Eagle Pass, Texas, and other border cities where migration spiked in recent years. Douglas has not been a regular backdrop for such visits.
When Nogales, Arizona, 80 miles to the west, experienced a migrant “bottleneck” in March, Douglas saw only a “trickling,” according to the mayor.
“We haven’t been overrun with those that present themselves legally at the border,” he said. “We don’t have the asylum seekers coming up through our part of Arizona.”
Trump generally gets higher marks from voters when pollsters ask who they trust more to secure the border.
Republicans regularly attack Harris as a failed “border czar,” though her assignment from Biden was to address root causes of migration from Central America, not oversee border policy.
Douglas and Agua Prieta have close economic ties. A May report from the U.S. General Services Administration found that about 70% of retail tax revenue in Douglas comes from shoppers who cross through its port of entry.
The monthly number of pedestrian crossings in Douglas has hovered between 60,000 to 70,000 this year.
“We consider ourselves one culture with our neighbors to the south, Agua Prieta,” Huish said. “Many of us have shared family members on both sides of the border. Our commerce works both ways.”
But like the other five ports of entry between Arizona and Mexico, the one in Douglas also is used by smugglers.
In 2018, officers intercepted $1.1 million worth of heroin, cocaine and fentanyl. In January, Customs and Border Protection caught a smuggler with 492,000 fentanyl pills in Douglas – a seizure eclipsed in August when officers at the Lukeville crossing intercepted 4 million pills, weighing more than half a ton.
“It’s not to the level of what we’re seeing in other parts of the nation,” the mayor said.
Agua Prieta has seen its share of cartel violence, including nighttime gun battles that awakened residents on the U.S. side. A rift within the Sinaloa cartel left five people dead on the Mexican side in June 2019.
“Apparently we have a war going on in Agua Prieta,” Rep. David Schweikert, R-Fountain Hills, said on the House floor at the time.
After President Joe Biden lifted Title 42 – the pandemic emergency measure invoked by Trump to keep out migrants – in May 2023, Douglas braced for hundreds of asylum-seekers.
On the first day, it received one couple with a toddler. The crisis Republicans warned about nationwide never materialized.
Metzger, among others, said he is worried that Harris’ desire to blunt GOP attacks has made her take too hard a line on border security.
She’s now “mimicking” Trump, he said, and he disapproves.
“Going to the border is kind of a cover to make her look tough like Donald Trump, tough on immigration,” he said. “We don’t need more militarization of the border. We need more humane policies.”
Cronkite News Washington correspondent Kelechukwu Iruoma contributed to this report.
