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Kamala Harris promised a fresh clampdown on illegal immigration at the US’s southern frontier as she sought to present a tougher stance on border security with the presidential race entering its final stretch.

On her first campaign trip to the US-Mexico border the vice-president pledged to move beyond measures imposed by the Biden administration, promising “further action” to prevent illegal crossings, tighter asylum measures and “more severe criminal charges” for illegal entrants.

“While we understand that many people are desperate to migrate to the United States our system must be orderly and secure,” she told a crowd in the Arizona city of Douglas.

The tougher rhetoric comes as the vice-president seeks to shake perceptions of a lax approach to migration and narrow the polling gap with Donald Trump on a crucial electoral issue.

While polls put Harris neck and neck with Trump overall, the former president consistently leads her on the question of border security. A recent NBC News poll gave Trump a 21-point advantage among voters on the topic.

The number of people crossing the country’s southern frontier surged to record levels under Joe Biden, peaking last December. But apprehensions have since fallen sharply after the president introduced an executive order including emergency measures to shutter the frontier.

Trump has made immigration a focal point of his campaign, accusing new arrivals of “poisoning the blood of our country” and proposing a crackdown involving militarised mass deportations.

Harris on Friday sought to push back, repeatedly pointing to the former president’s efforts to scuttle a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year, accusing him of an “abdication of leadership” and of prioritising politics over real solutions.

“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said of the bill. “He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill. He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Harris said that if elected she would work with Congress to pass the border security bill, as well as unspecified actions to keep the border closed between legal crossing points and barring some illegal entrants from being able to claim asylum.

Trump has sought to tie Harris to the surge in illegal border crossings during Biden’s term in office, dubbing her the president’s “border tsar”, a label her campaign has rejected.

A Trump campaign spokesperson on Friday dismissed Harris’s border visit as a “desperate attempt to fool Americans into forgetting the chaos and devastation she has unleashed over her four years as border tsar”.

US Vice-President Kamala Harris has made a rare trip to the US-Mexico border as she seeks to blunt Republican attacks on immigration.

Harris, who last visited the border in 2021, accused Donald Trump of being focused on “scapegoating instead of solutions” and “rhetoric instead of results”.

Earlier on Friday, the Republican nominee argued Harris was “getting killed” on the issue and supports “the worst bill ever drawn” on border security.

Polls suggest more Americans trust Trump over Harris on handling the border and illegal immigration.

Cochise County, a conservative stronghold in Arizona that became a hot spot for record-high border crossings last autumn, provided a backdrop for the Democratic nominee to inspect the border wall, speak with local officials and project a message of toughness.

She claimed Trump “did nothing to fix our broken immigration system” as president, adding that Republicans were trying to force a “false choice” between border security and a “safe, orderly and humane” immigration system.

“We can and must do both,” she told supporters at a campaign event in Douglas.

Harris vowed to further toughen asylum laws enacted earlier this year by President Joe Biden and to revive a bipartisan border security measure Trump helped block.

But Jim Chilton, a local rancher, said he has “seen the evidence” of what Harris would do in power.

“I’ve watched her and President Biden,” he told the BBC. “We’ve had an open border policy. We now are understanding what that really means.”

Every year, thousands of undocumented migrants walk through Mr Chilton’s 50,000-acre ranch just south of Arivaca.

He has motion-activated cameras that show the procession of people, all dressed in near-identical camouflage, across his land. He is convinced drug dealers and gang members are among them.

Menacing signs threaten trespassers with death, but Mr Chilton has also installed drinking fountains so nobody dies making the hazardous journey.

Three corpses were found on his land last year.

A Trump supporter, Mr Chilton does not believe Harris will crack down on the flow of migrants.

“She’s changing her mind just to get votes and lie to us. It’s outrageous,” he said.

Concerns over stemming the influx are ever present in tiny border towns like Douglas.

Homeowners here can see through miles of border fencing into Mexico when they step out onto their front porches.

One woman said her neighbours built brick walls around their homes to keep migrants from hiding out in their backyards.

Even some Democrats here who are voting for Harris said they preferred Trump’s border approach and felt safer during his tenure.

Last year, a handful of churches and the town’s visitor centre transformed overnight into makeshift shelters to house newcomers.

Since then, the Biden administration has enacted tougher restrictions on seeking asylum and migrant crossings have plunged to four-year lows.

Gail Kochorek is a dedicated volunteer who drives down to the wall to hand out food and water to people on the Mexican side, usually waiting until after dark to cross back into the US.

To her, the political approach to immigration is increasingly dehumanising to people hoping to making a better life in her country.

She is disappointed to hear Harris promising to crack down on migrants but, given a choice between her and Trump, the Democrat can count on Ms Kochorek’s vote.

Laughing at Trump’s pledges to secure the border, she showed the BBC gaps in Trump’s wall and where people could cut through the steel fencing.

The former president has vowed to seal the border by completing construction of the barrier, increasing enforcement and implementing the largest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history.

But earlier this year, he urged Republicans to ditch a hardline, cross-party border bill that was endorsed by Biden and Harris.

“That’s the worst bill ever drawn. It’s a waste of paper,” Trump told supporters earlier on Friday at a rally in Walker, in the swing state of Michigan.

Denying that he lobbied congressional allies to tank the piece of legislation, Trump claimed Harris “want to see if she could salvage it and make up some lies”.

“She went to the border today because she’s getting killed on the border,” he said.

In a statement following Harris’s event, the Trump campaign characterised the visit as a “drop-in” and “photo op”.

The border crisis has been a major vulnerability for Harris.

As vice-president, she has not directly shaped border policy but was put in charge of addressing the root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

Her efforts targeted systemic issues like poverty, corruption, and violence, which for years have driven large numbers of people from these regions to make the treacherous journey to the United States.

It is too soon to tell if the two-part strategy – bolstering democratic institutions and coaxing business leaders to invest in the region – is working, but Harris has taken a lot of blame for upward trends in migration.

As a candidate, she has highlighted her experience as a prosecutor when she was attorney general of California, particularly in investigating transnational and cartel organisations, to emphasise her approach to tackling immigration-related challenges.

Her recent remarks have aligned closely with Biden’s emphasis on border security and law enforcement, but also reflect how the politics of the issue have shifted notably to the right.

As she seeks to convince voters that she has a plan, her biggest challenge is finding an approach that balances the legal and humanitarian aspects of the immigration system.

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A top Federal Reserve official said the US central bank should revert to cutting interest rates “gradually”, after a larger than usual half-point reduction earlier this month.

St Louis Fed president Alberto Musalem said the US economy could react “very vigorously” to looser financial conditions, stoking demand and prolonging the central bank’s mission to beat inflation back to 2 per cent.

“For me, it’s about easing off the brake at this stage. It’s about making policy gradually less restrictive,” Musalem told the Financial Times on Friday. He was among officials to pencil in more than one quarter-point cut for the remainder of the year, according to projections released at this month’s meeting.

The comments from Musalem, who became the St Louis Fed’s president in April and will be a voting member on the Federal Open Market Committee next year, came less than two weeks after the Fed lopped half a percentage point from rates, forgoing a more traditional quarter-point cut to kick off its first easing cycle since the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020.

The jumbo cut left benchmark rates at 4.75 per cent to 5 per cent — a move that Fed chair Jay Powell said was aimed at maintaining the strength of the world’s largest economy and staving off labour market weakness now that inflation was retreating.

On Friday, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge fell more than expected to an annual rate of 2.2 per cent in August.

Musalem, who supported the cut in September, acknowledged that the labour market had cooled in recent months, but remained positive about the outlook given the low rate of lay-offs and underlying strength of the economy.

The business sector was in a “good place” with activity overall “solid”, he said, adding that mass lay-offs did not appear “imminent”. Still, he conceded the Fed faced risks that could require it to cut rates more quickly.

“I’m attuned to the fact that the economy could weaken more than I currently expect [and] the labour market could weaken more than I currently expect,” he said. “If that were the case, then a faster pace of rate reductions might be appropriate.”

That echoed comments from governor Christopher Waller last week, who said he would be “much more willing to be aggressive on rate cuts” if the data weakened more quickly.

Musalem said the risks of the economy weakening or heating up too quickly were now balanced, and the next rate decision would depend on data at the time.

The Fed’s latest “dot plot” showed most officials expected rates to fall by another half a percentage point over the course of the two remaining meetings of the year. The next meeting is on November 6, a day after the US presidential election.

Officials had a wide range of views, however, with two of them signalling the Fed should hold off on more cuts, while another seven forecast only one more quarter-point cut this year.

Policymakers also expected the funds rate to fall another percentage point in 2025, ending the year between 3.25 per cent and 3.5 per cent. By the end of 2026, it was estimated to fall just below 3 per cent.

Musalem pushed back on the idea that September’s half-point move was a “catch-up cut” because the Fed had been too slow to ease monetary policy, saying inflation had fallen far faster than he had expected.

“It was appropriate to begin with a strong and clear message to the economy that we’re starting from a position of strength,” he said.