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By Mia Osmonbekov
Cronkite News

CHICAGO – When President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Democrats offered a sharp contrast with incumbent Donald Trump’s strict border policies and harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“Not only do immigrants support us – immigrants are us,” the party’s platform said.

The updated platform, ratified this week at the Democratic National Convention, takes a much different tack amid Republican attacks over illegal border crossings that spiked to record levels at the end of December.

Some variation of the phrase “secure the border” appears 13 times in the 2024 Democratic platform – up from zero in the 2020 version. Odes to the role immigrants have played in building the United States have been largely replaced with vows to secure the border, crack down on fentanyl trafficking and expand the Border Patrol.

In 2020, Democrats were running against Trump’s record. Now they’re largely on defense as they co-opt some GOP rhetoric to deflect widespread concern about the border and relentless GOP accusations that Vice President Kamala Harris is a “border czar.”

Major differences certainly remain. Trump promises mass roundups and deportations and wants to send troops to the border. Democrats reject those ideas and continue to press for legal protections for younger immigrants and a path to citizenship for millions of longtime U.S. residents.

State Sen. Priya Sundareshan, D-Tucson, said Democrats remain committed to a comprehensive set of solutions to immigration and border security – “a humanitarian approach, something that is holistic that addresses the root causes of why there might be traffic across the border.”

“A modern approach does not mean build a wall and hope that that stops everything,” she said.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, also a delegate in Chicago, said the semantics of the platform matter less than the values behind the policies.

“Part of a comprehensive approach to immigration has to include security,” he said, emphasizing that he was not speaking in his official capacity as the state’s top election official.

“The folks that actually want to solve the problems, not the folks that want to take political advantage of an issue, are the ones who are better equipped to deal with it,” he said. “That means that Donald Trump’s not the choice when it comes to immigration or border security.”

Earlier this year, at Trump’s urging, Senate Republicans quashed a bipartisan border security bill backed by Biden and many of the Democrats’ adversaries on such issues, including the union that represents Border Patrol officers.

The new Democratic platform highlights the episode, describing the failed bill as “the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border in decades.” Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, helped negotiate the border deal, which aimed to reduce illegal crossings and tighten asylum requirements.

The platform codifies the Democratic view that Trump and fellow Republicans were “playing politics,” preferring to hand Biden a defeat than take steps toward “lasting, comprehensive reforms.”

“The Republicans don’t really want to fix it, or else they wouldn’t have killed the bill,” said Democratic delegate Ken Budge, the mayor of Bisbee, a border city in southeast Arizona.

Budge said his city would see far greater benefit from more border agents, a more efficient asylum system and reforms to temporary work visas than a resumption of wall construction, which Trump has promised.

“The wall doesn’t work. I’ve been on the wall, I’ve been down with the ranchers, and it’s the old saying ‘you build a 10-foot wall, they get an 11-foot ladder,’” Budge said.

The 2024 platform calls for more Border Patrol agents, asylum judges, technology and funding for states that shelter migrants, casting Trump’s approach as an effort to “devastate our economy and tear families apart” via deportations and an end to birthright citizenship.

Another Arizona border official, Mayor Nieves Riedel of San Luis – who is not a Democratic delegate – stressed that while there’s a “humanitarian crisis” at the border, it’s far from the hellscape Republicans depict.

“We do have a problem, there’s no question about it,” she said by phone. “But the people back east, the people in Washington, they have never been to our border. The boogeyman right now is immigration and that’s sad because we’re talking about human beings.”

An executive order that Biden signed in June has already curbed illegal border crossings, according to Riedel.

Last fall, federal authorities released hundreds of asylum seekers in Bisbee, Douglas, San Luis and other border communities, often with little or no warning, to ease overcrowding at federal facilities – angering local authorities.

Robert Watkins, operations commander for the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security bused 40,000 migrants into the county in 2023. That’s a huge influx for a county of about 126,000.

“That’s how broken this immigration system is,” Watkins said.

In one incident that Watkins called “catastrophic,” the Border Patrol released 30 migrants in May 2023 in Bisbee, population about 4,900. The city lacked resources to support them.

“None of these 30 migrants spoke English or Spanish, from countries of unknown origin, and they were released into the desert for (Bisbee) to take care of,” he said. “That’s not human.”

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