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.
In interviews, retired and current California prosecutors recalled that before Ms. Harris took office, they grappled with limited resources and shared little information on cases with one another. Many of their police and sheriff departments focused on arresting small-time dealers who were easily replaced on the streets, they said. That left them outmatched by criminal organizations, many with ties to Latin America and Asia, that expanded across borders and, like growing corporations, diversified beyond trafficking in only drugs.
“We were keeping ourselves busy running around the same track,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, who spent a decade as the chief of staff to district attorneys in San Francisco and who now leads the Prosecutors Alliance of California, a nonprofit centered on criminal justice reform.
Some of Ms. Harris’s most successful cases, according to those who worked with her, are those she now cites on the trail: She took down cocaine and methamphetamine networks with ties to the Sinaloa and Guadalajara cartels, a heroin trafficking ring in the Bay Area linked to other Mexican criminal groups, and a drug trafficking operation that, as she said, included “pill mills and so-called recovery centers that were pushing opioids with deadly results.”
Striking a balance
Ms. Harris is leaning into that experience as she runs on the most conservative border and immigration platform of any Democrat in decades. She has pledged to double the resources for the Justice Department to extradite and prosecute members of transnational criminal organizations; pursue more severe criminal charges against people who repeatedly cross the border illegally; and pour more funding into personnel, training and surveillance at the nation’s southern border.
At the same time, Ms. Harris is also pledging to make paths to citizenship, asylum and other forms of legal status faster and more accessible for immigrants whom she describes as law-abiding and hard-working.
Prosecutors and state lawmakers who have followed Ms. Harris’s career say they see parallels in her attempts to balance toughness and compassion at the border with her broad approach toward criminal justice. As a prosecutor, Ms. Harris was known for cracking down on violent offenders but also for her willingness to seek resources for victims, experiment with criminal justice reforms for defendants charged with less grave crimes and even reach across the political aisle.
Michael A. Ramos, a Republican former district attorney in San Bernardino County, Calif., befriended Ms. Harris when she was a prosecutor in the Bay Area. He and Ms. Harris first came together to call for more state funds for their witness protection programs, he said, after key witnesses in both of their cases were killed in gang violence. He also credits her with pushing him and thousands of other law enforcement officers to move away from incarcerating people — many of them young women and girls — who were involved in the sex trade.
“I don’t care where you go, it is the same dynamics,” Mr. Ramos said of Ms. Harris’s view that tougher enforcement alone wouldn’t solve the border crisis. “You have to protect your victims and your witnesses. You have to use your resources to protect your communities.”
Intraparty tension
The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have disparaged Ms. Harris’s record as a prosecutor in California, contending that her approach toward nonviolent defendants led to the release of dangerous undocumented immigrants. Some Democrats and civil and immigrant rights lawyers, on the other hand, worry that Ms. Harris has tilted too far to the right on issues in which crime, the border and immigration overlap, potentially setting up future policy fights within her party should she win the presidential election in November.
During her unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination in 2019, and in the run-up to her selection as Mr. Biden’s running mate, her criminal justice background was seen by some Democrats as a liability. Her work had put her at the front lines of the fight against fentanyl and transnational crime. But the kind of cases she worked on had also fueled fierce national debates over law enforcement tactics that progressive Democrats and criminal justice activists warned often led to racial and ethnic profiling and encroached on people’s civil rights.
The Harris campaign did not respond to questions about whether she backs some of those tactics now as a presidential candidate.
One tool that the California attorney general’s office under Ms. Harris supported was cellphone surveillance tracking technology that law enforcement officers used to scan hundreds of messages, conversations and call logs, according to documents first reported in 2015 by the investigative news outlet Reveal. A spokeswoman for the state’s Justice Department said at the time that law enforcement officers needed to obtain warrants for its use but did not provide a copy of its written policy on the technology.
As attorney general, Ms. Harris also backed a bill in the state legislature in 2015 allowing California law enforcement to seize private property before filing criminal charges, which she argued would prevent transnational gangs from liquidating their assets.
That process, known as civil asset forfeiture, was criticized by civil rights activists on the left and libertarians on the right, and at the same time, the Obama administration was cracking down on abuses of it at the federal level.
Reports by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and the Drug Policy Alliance argued that the authorities were targeting low-income people of color and seizing their property without proof that they had done anything wrong.
Civil asset forfeiture “was designed to go after the big fish, the kingpin,” said Theshia Naidoo, the managing director of advocacy and U.S. foreign policy at the Drug Policy Alliance. “But it really was a civil rights issue and issue of racial justice when you saw who were the victims.”
Supporters of the legislation said the policy would be used exclusively against major criminals because it applied only to assets valued at $10,000 or more, and a later version of the bill increased that minimum to $100,000. Jeff Tsai, who handled policy on transnational crime under Ms. Harris when she was attorney general, said the bill also contained safeguards against civil liberties violations, including a requirement that prosecutors obtain approval from a judge before seizing assets and show that criminal charges would be filed imminently.
In the end, a fiscal analysis of the bill found that it would create more work for trial courts, and it wasn’t put to a vote. The next year, the state legislature reversed course and restricted civil asset forfeiture.
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