Republican VP nominee JD Vance heading to GA for border security, immigration campaign event

VALDOSTA, Ga. — Ohio Senator and Republican Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance is heading to Georgia on Thursday afternoon to discuss border security and immigration.

He’ll be making a stop in Valdosta for a 1 p.m. event, where he will speak about what his and former President Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign call a “path of death and destruction left behind by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” the Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees.

According to the event announcement from the Trump-Vance campaign, the immigration policies of the Harris agenda is making American families “pay a steep price for Kamala’s dangerously liberal agenda devastating American cities with skyrocketing costs and crime-ridden streets.”

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The campaign said 5,000 undocumented migrants are released into the United States every day and that more than 900,000 were released in fiscal year 2023, still waiting to have their immigration court dates.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in FY2023, about 5,654 Title 8 apprehensions and Title 42 encounters happened on a typical day between the various ports of entry.

CBP says “Title 8 Enforcement Actions” refer to the apprehensions or inadmissible migrants processed by the agency, meaning those seeking lawful admission into the United States, but who are not admissible at the time.

Separately, a Title 42 encounter is when individuals encountered by United States Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations are expelled from the U.S. to their last transit or home country, in the interest of public health.

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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said that as of 2023, the agency had reduced its backlog by 15%, the first reduction in more than 10 years.

In 2023, 870,332 migrants from countries in Central and South America, Africa and Asia applied for temporary protection status in the United States, more popularly referred to as a request for asylum. USCIS reported in the same year that 497,514 of the applicants were of an unknown immigration status at the time of filing for asylum.

Of the overall applicants in 2023, 3.2% of them were living in the state of Georgia when they filed. That’s more than 28,000 asylum-seekers, according to USCIS data from their yearly congressional report.

In the weeks since becoming the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, Harris’ campaign has come out against the title of “border czar” used by critics of current border policy and the Trump-Vance campaign. Rather than accept the title, the campaign said Harris chose to take a long-term approach to border crossing and immigration issues, as border crossings increased during the presidency of Joe Biden.

“She felt — and I think she was right — that what she could do the most was help basically lead the effort to draw in investment, using the confidence that a relationship with the White House would give to investors,” Ricardo Zúniga, a former State Department official who specialized in the Northern Triangle and who traveled with Harris to the region, told the Associated Press previously.

In Georgia, Vance will speak in Valdosta at the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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