DOUGLAS, Arizona — Vice President Kamala Harris toured the border wall in southern Arizona on Friday and promised to stiffen security along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, including blocking asylum claims from those who attempt to jump the border.

Ms. Harris also promised more personnel and more technology to stop the flow of fentanyl coming in along the border.

On illegal immigration, she said she’ll go even further than her current boss, President Biden, in shutting down the border, including stiffening the power to expel illegal immigrants and to deny asylum claims unless they are made at official border crossings.

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“Our system must be orderly and secure, and that is my goal. That is my goal,” she said.

Ms. Harris also renewed her call for amnesty for current illegal immigrants, particularly for illegal immigrant farm workers and so-called “Dreamers,” illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

Ms. Harris was making just her second trip to the border as vice president — and her first in more than three years.

She delivered a withering critique of former President Donald Trump’s own record.

“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages and tried to end protections for Dreamers,” she said.

Ms. Harris said Mr. Trump didn’t add more Border Patrol agents or immigration judges, didn’t fix the asylum system and didn’t work with other governments to try to derail the flow of people.

“In the four years Donald Trump was president he did nothing to fix our broken immigration system,” she said.

In fact, Mr. Trump proposed adding 5,000 Border Patrol agents and still more deportation officers, but Congress never funded it. He proposed new asylum restrictions but immigrant-rights activists sued to block those changes in the courts. He did sign agreements with other countries to head off bogus asylum claims but the Biden administration canceled those once it took office.

On a press call arranged by the Trump campaign, mothers who lost children and blamed it on the border chaos blasted Ms. Harris.

“I don’t know how many more people Kamala Harris thinks have to die before she will say something like yes, we have a problem,” said Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was slain in Maryland last year.

Anne Fundner, mother of a boy who died of a fentanyl overdose, said Ms. Harris has shown “complacency” on the border.

“A photo op won’t bring our kids back,” she said.

Ms. Harris spent roughly 20 minutes along the border wall on Friday. The section she toured was built in the Obama administration to carry out the Secure Fence Act, signed by President George W. Bush.

The U.S.-facing side of the wall is filled with razor wire — something the Biden administration has criticized when it was Texas stringing miles of it along that state’s border.

Ms. Harris on Friday renewed her promise to pursue a border bill written by senators earlier this year that would have made some changes to asylum claims and created a border expulsion authority similar to the Title 42 power instituted by Mr. Trump during the pandemic in 2020.

“Donald Trump tanked it,” Ms. Harris said. “He picked up the phone, called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill.”

In reality, the bill was dead well before Mr. Trump opposed it.

House Republicans had made clear it wouldn’t clear their chamber and it couldn’t even clear a majority, much less overcome a filibuster in the Senate, after some Democrats joined Republicans in opposing it.

Ms. Harris faces a tricky balancing act, with her need to try to reclaim some ground with a public fed up with the border chaos, even as she tries to placate her left wing that has cheered the surge of migrants,

Her political history puts her far closer to those left wingers. She has compared deportation officers to the Ku Klux Klan and Border Patrol agents to slave masters, and has cheered on calls to decriminalize illegal immigration and curtail deportations.

That, however, is not what voters are looking for right now.

On Friday she praised Border Patrol agents, saying “they’ve got a tough job” and calling them “very dedicated.”

The good news for Democrats is that numbers at the border have improved since December, which was by far the worst month on record. Border Patrol agents that month made nearly 250,000 apprehensions at the southern border. In August the number was below 60,000.

But unauthorized migrants are still streaming in through the administration’s “parole” programs, which bypass the usual immigration system and allow in people who have no legal right to enter. Homeland Security has carved out slots for more than 70,000 people per month to be paroled.

And the bad news for Democrats is the more than 5 million illegal immigrants who have already arrived on Ms. Harris’s watch, and who are still straining local resources and committing high-profile crimes.

This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed that a Venezuelan migrant paroled into the U.S. by the Biden administration in October 2022 has already tallied four arrests in Fairfax County, 

Yohandri Roger Mosquera-Rosas’s rap sheet included charges of malicious wounding, reckless endangerment of a child, two DUI and hit-and-run cases and multiple gun-related charges.

Fairfax County’s sheriff’s department, under its sanctuary policy declined three detainer requests from ICE officers seeking to get Mosquera-Rosas off the streets.

• Stephen Dinan contributed to this article.