Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning on a pledge to toughen border restrictions as Republicans hammer her over the Biden-Harris administration’s record on immigration.

Harris in late September visited the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time as the Democratic presidential nominee and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, which produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. Harris said she would take it even further. 

Immigration problems are nothing new, but there was a record number of undocumented immigrants coming across the border during the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration after pandemic-era immigration policies and other restrictions were loosened.

“Solutions are at hand. And from Day One, literally, we have been offering solutions,” Harris said.

She pointed to the recent decrease in illegal immigration: Border crossings plunged this year, with illegal crossings at the southern border reaching the lowest point of President Biden’s administration in September, according to internal Department of Homeland Security statistics obtained by CBS News.

Earlier this year, bipartisan legislation aiming to overhaul the immigration system failed in Congress after Trump urged Republicans to oppose it.

“We need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem,” Harris said. 

As vice president, Harris’ responsibilities on the immigration issue have often been mischaracterized by her political opponents. Mr. Biden in 2021 tasked Harris with leading the administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the “root causes” of migration from Central America’s Northern Triangle — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. 

Trump has wrongly called Harris the administration’s “border czar.”

Bill Whitaker

Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.