Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, answers questions at a Univision town hall on Oct. 10, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Felipe Cuevas/TelevisaUnivision)

Vice President Kamala Harris fielded a series of questions from undecided Latino voters on Thursday during an emotional town hall in Las Vegas hosted by Univision.

Harris continues to court this key voting bloc as Election Day rapidly approaches and she and former President Donald Trump vie for the Oval Office in an extremely close race.

Thursday’s town hall — featuring questions on subjects ranging from immigration and health care, to abortion and the economy — came as the Harris campaign launched the “Hombres con Harris” initiative this week to mobilize Latino men in battleground states.

Trump’s town hall with Univision was postponed to next week due to Hurricane Milton.

A ‘broken’ immigration system 

Harris heard from one audience member who said her mother died six weeks ago without being able to obtain legal status and could not get the medical care she needed.

The veep expressed her sympathy and pointed to the country’s “broken immigration system.”

“The reality is that in terms of having access to health care, had your mother been able to gain citizenship, she would have been entitled to health care that may have alleviated her suffering and yours,” she said.

Harris also mentioned her own mother and her immigration to the United States, saying: “I know what it is like to have a hardworking mother who loves you and to lose that, but I know that her spirit is alive.” Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, emigrated from India and was a cancer researcher.

During the town hall, Harris also repeated her vow she would, if elected, bring back and sign into law a major bipartisan border security bill, while blaming its legislative failure on Trump.

She also said she will “do the work of focusing on what we must do to have an orderly and humane pathway to earn citizenship for hardworking people.”

Harris was also asked about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that is currently under threat and designed to protect children — also known as Dreamers — who were brought into the country illegally from deportation.

“I just think it’s important that we recognize who this population of young people are and agree that they have been so productive, they are prepared to do what is necessary by law, and I think it should compel us to agree they should not have to live in fear, but should have an ability to be on a pathway to earn their citizenship,” she said.

“So, it is one of my priorities, and I’ve worked on this in terms of Dreamers for many, many years, and I’ll continue to fight for them.”

Health care, abortion access and the economy 

Harris said she firmly and deeply believes “access to health care is a right and should be a right, and not just a privilege of those who can afford it or have access to it easily” when asked how she plans to improve the health care system.

She also echoed her commitment to reproductive rights, saying if elected, she will “probably sign back into law the protections of Roe v. Wade, which basically just says it’s the person’s decision, not the government’s decision.”

Harris also touched on the broad Medicare plan she unveiled earlier this week that would strengthen the insurance program’s coverage to include long-term care for seniors in their homes.

The plan focuses on the “sandwich generation,” which refers to Americans who are raising their children while also caring for their aging parents.

Asked about how she would help the middle class, Harris highlighted her economic plan, including $6,000 in tax relief for new parents for the first year of their child’s life, as much as $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and an up to $50,000 tax break for first-time small businesses.

Trump in Aurora, Colorado 

Trump was set to appear at a rally Friday in Aurora, Colorado — which he falsely claims is overrun by Venezuelan gangs.

Last month, Trump pledged to carry out the “largest deportation in the history of our country” if elected — noting that Aurora would be one of the two places he’d start with.

The other, Trump said back in September, would be Springfield, Ohio — the center of false claims he’s made surrounding legal Haitian migrants.

Trump is set to hold several other rallies this weekend, including in: Reno, Nevada, later on Friday; Coachella, California, on Saturday; and Prescott Valley, Arizona, on Sunday.

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Aerial view of the Bridge of the Americas Land Port of Entry. One of four crossings in El Paso, the Bridge of the Americas is located on the international border separating El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico and connects with the Mexican port of “Cordova” in Juarez, Chihuahua. (Jerry Glaser | U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

This is one in a series of States Newsroom reports on the major policy issues in the presidential race.

WASHINGTON — Immigration remains at the forefront of the 2024 presidential election, with both candidates taking a tougher stance than in the past on the flow of migrants into the United States.

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has made immigration a core campaign issue, as he did in his two previous bids for the White House, and has expanded his attacks this time around to include false claims about migrants with legal status in specific locations like Springfield, Ohio.

He’s often demonized immigrants in speeches and at rallies, and has vowed to enact the mass deportation of millions of people living in the United States without authorization.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, like the Biden administration, has shifted to the right on immigration, embracing limits to asylum and advocating for added border security, as migrant encounters hit a record high at the end of 2023. With those new policies in place, migrant encounters have sharply fallen this year.

Vice President Harris in her remarks on immigration has mainly stuck to her promise to sign into law a bipartisan border security deal that three senators struck earlier this year. That legislation, if enacted, would have been the most drastic change in U.S. immigration law in decades.

The deal never made it out of the Senate. Once Trump expressed his displeasure with the bill, House Republicans pulled their support, and the GOP in the upper chamber followed suit.

Harris has not detailed her positions on immigration beyond her support of the border security bill.

Regardless of who wins the White House, the incoming administration will be tasked with the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects a little over half a million undocumented people brought into the United States as children without authorization. A Texas legal challenge threatens the legality of the program, and the case could make its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Additionally, work visas, massive backlogs in U.S. immigration courts and renewing those individuals in Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, will fall to the next administration. Neither candidate has laid out how they would handle those issues.

The Trump campaign did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.

The Harris campaign pointed to the vice president’s remarks from an Arizona campaign rally where she acknowledged the U.S. has a broken immigration system and put her support behind border security and legal pathways to citizenship.

Harris also took a September trip to the southern border. 

Promise: border security deal

Harris has made the bipartisan border deal a centerpiece of her campaign. She’s often promised to sign it into law and has used the proposal to criticize Trump.

“We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” Harris said during the Democratic National Convention in August.

The bill negotiated by senators would need to reach the 60-vote threshold to advance through the chamber. But after Trump came out against it and it was brought to the floor, the Republican who handled negotiations with Democrats and the White House, Oklahoma’s James Lankford, voted against his own bill.

Additionally, House Democrats in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and immigration groups were not supportive of the bill.

“I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law,” Harris said at the DNC.

The measure raises the bar for asylum, and would require asylum seekers to provide greater proof of their fear of persecution.

The bill would have also provided $20 billion for the hiring of more than 4,000 asylum officers, legal counsel for unaccompanied minors and the purchase of drug screening technology at ports of entry. It would also have provided $8 billion for detention facilities to add 50,000 detention beds.

The plan did include some legal pathways to citizenship for Afghans who aided the U.S. and fled in 2021 after the U.S. withdrew from the country. It also provided up to 10,000 special visas for family members of those Afghan allies.

It also would have added 250,000 green-card employee and family-based visas over the next five years.

Promise: mass deportations

“Send them back,” is chanted at Trump’s rallies, where he often promises to carry out mass deportations.

There are roughly 11 million people in the U.S. without legal authorization.

“We’re going to have the largest deportation,” Trump said at a June campaign rally in Racine, Wisconsin. “We have no choice.”

Under Trump’s vision, mass deportation would be a broad, multipronged effort that includes invoking an 18th-century law; reshuffling law enforcement at federal agencies; transferring funds within programs in the Department of Homeland Security; and forcing greater enforcement of immigration laws.

Promise: an end to birthright citizenship

In a May 2023 campaign video, Trump said if he wins the White House, one of his first moves would be to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship, which means anyone born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ status, is an American citizen.

This is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and would likely face legal challenges.

“As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” Trump said.

Promise: deportation of pro-Palestinian students on visas

Across the country, students on college campuses during the past year have set up encampments and protests calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the Israel-Hamas war.

In the initial attack on Oct. 7, 2023, more than 1,200 people were killed in Israel and hundreds taken hostage. As the war has continued, researchers estimate that as many as 186,000 Palestinians have been killed.

At a private dinner in May, Trump told donors that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” according to the Washington Post.

“You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” Trump said. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”

Trump also made that vow during a campaign rally in October 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“We’ll terminate the visas of all of Hamas’ sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country, if that’s OK with you,” he said.

The Republican party made it part of its party platform in July. 

Promise: an end to parole programs

With immigration reform stalled in Congress, one way the Biden administration has handled mass migration is the use of humanitarian parole programs. Those humanitarian parole programs have been used for Ukrainians fleeing the war with Russia, Afghans fleeing after the U.S. withdrawal and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.

More than 1 million people have been paroled into the U.S. under the executive authority extended by the Biden administration.

Trump said in a November 2023 campaign video  he would end this policy on his first day in office.

“I will stop the outrageous abuse of parole authority,” Trump said.

Promise: green cards for foreign students

In a June podcast interview, Trump said that he was supportive of giving green cards to foreign students if they graduate from a U.S. college.

“What I will do is, if you graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” Trump said. “That includes junior colleges, too.”

This would be done through rulemaking from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

On the podcast, Trump also said he would extend H-1B visas for tech workers. Those visas allow employers to hire foreign workers for specialized occupations, usually for a high skill role.

Promise: more screenings of immigrants

On social media, the Trump campaign said it would put in place an “ideological screening” for all immigrants and bar those who have sympathies toward Hamas.

Promise: Trump-era immigration policies 

Trump has stated in various campaign speeches that he plans to reinstate his immigration policies from his first term.

That would include the continuation of building a wall along the southern border; reissuing a travel ban on individuals from predominantly Muslim countries; suspending travel of refugees; reinstating a public health policy that barred migrants from claiming asylum amid the coronavirus pandemic; and reinstating the remain in Mexico policy that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting their cases.

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