Aug. 1 (UPI) -- Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, on Thursday was in Arizona at the border for a campaign event in which he was critical of Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration's border policies.
"It's hard to believe until you see it with your own eyes, just how bad the policies of the Kamala Harris administration have been when it comes to the southern border," Vance said, ignoring President Joe Biden and, instead, directly blaming Harris, the current vice president and now presumptive Democratic nominee.
Vance, 39, made a series of campaign visits in the battleground state in the first Arizona rallies held since former President Donald Trump's attempted assassination, and he was slated to be in Cochise County along the Arizona-Mexico border.
The event Thursday was hosted by the Cochise County Sheriff's Office, where Vance was joined by National Border Patrol Council President Paul Perez and John Ladd, an Arizona border rancher whose ranch Vance had a planned tour until inclement weather forced organizers to move to the Coronado National Memorial.
The Ohio Republican spoke of his mother's well-documented past with drug addiction when he was a child as he tied that life experience to the struggles by those affected by fentanyl, with a large part of the illicit drug making its way over the border with Mexico.
"I have been a little kid waiting at the bedside of his mother, angry that his mom took something that she shouldn't have taken, but praying to God, please Jesus, let her wake up," he said.
Vance claimed that Harris "let" fentanyl enter the United States, saying that because of this, "there are a lot of those prayers that won't be answered. There are a lot of parents that won't wake up. Because when you take fentanyl, you don't wake up, it takes your life."
The campaign event came the day after U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that border agents had seized on July 1 a "record" four million blue fentanyl pills in a bust weighing more than 1,000 pounds, which set a new CBP record for a single bust.
Vance said if people "can come into this country and they know they're never going to be deported, you effectively have an open border."
"That's what Kamala Harris promised," Vance claimed Thursday. "That's what Kamala Harris did, and Donald Trump and I promise to do exactly the opposite."
Vance's trip came the day after the White House announced Wednesday new efforts to curb access to fentanyl and other synthetic drugs.
