During her time as a senator, Sen. Kamala Harris compared deportation officers to the KKK and hinted at abolishing their agency altogether. Once in office as vice president, Ms. Harris compared some Border Patrol agents to whip-wielding slave masters.

Now, as she seeks to win the White House on her own terms, Ms. Harris praises those same Border Patrol agents, saying they are “very dedicated” and have “a tough job.”

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She says she wants to send them reinforcements with 1,500 more agents and give their fellow border officers who man the ports of entry better technology to stop fentanyl.

It’s part of a massive makeover as Ms. Harris looks to patch one of the biggest political pitfalls of the Biden-Harris administration.

Her major foray into immigration has been to embrace a border bill written by three senators that called for a rewrite of asylum rules to close the loopholes illegal immigrants have used to flood the country under her boss, President Biden. That’s coupled with reviving expulsion authority similar to the Title 42 pandemic policy Mr. Biden canceled more than a year ago.

“Stopping transnational criminal organizations and strengthening our border is not new to me, and it is a longstanding priority of mine,” she said during a visit to the border late last month — her first in three years.

The bill she’s backing failed to clear the Democrat-led Senate, much less the GOP-controlled House, and Ms. Harris’s hopes of unsticking the legislation rely more on hope than political realities.

“It is therefore critically important that anybody who calls themselves a leader would work with other leaders for commonsense solutions understanding the pain and the suffering that Americans are experiencing if we don’t work together to fix these problems,” she said during her border visit.

She said the Border Patrol’s union endorsed the bill — a claim the union clarifies, saying it supported taking up the legislation in the Senate in order to improve it.

Ms. Harris’ makeover has intrigued immigration policy experts who say it marks a major shift for her party.

“While Republican and Democratic politicians may differ sharply in tone and nuance, today there is far more alignment between the two parties — at least on border policies — than at any point in the last two decades,” the Migration Policy Institute said in an analysis late last month.

Not everyone is buying the makeover.

The National Border Patrol Council, whom Ms. Harris cites on the border bill, is backing former President Donald Trump.

“He has always stood with the men and women who protect this border, who put their lives on the line for the country,” said NBPC President Paul Perez at a rally with Mr. Trump earlier this month.

Mr. Trump, for his part, told Mr. Perez at a rally in Arizona that he wants to hire 10,000 more Border Patrol agents. That doubles his unfulfilled plans from his previous term in office, when he called for 5,000 agents, but Congress never funded them.

Mr. Trump has also promised to finish his half-built border wall, revive his Remain in Mexico policy and re-strike asylum agreements with Central American nations.

He also said he would end the rampant use of “parole,” the legal authority the Biden-Harris administration has used to welcome millions of migrants who are, under the law, inadmissible aliens.

Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow on immigration at the Heritage Foundation, said the two candidates bring wildly differing philosophies.

He said he expects Mr. Trump would restore the “tested policies” that led to the lowest levels of illegal border crossings in decades. Ms. Harris, he predicted, would quickly undo the “current fig-leaf attempt” by Mr. Biden to embrace get-tough rhetoric.

But Jennie Murray, president of the National Immigration Forum, said Ms. Harris is doing a better job of tailoring herself to where voters are by seeking a tougher border policy combined with a more generous approach for those already here illegally and those seeking to come legally in the future.

“She has changed considerably, but what I would say about that is Americans have changed,” Ms. Murray said. “The ways that you’ve seen her change is she’s responding to where Americans are right now. I think Trump is trying to lead Americans to where he wants to see folks on the issue.”

Legal immigration

Mr. Trump surprised some in the immigration world with his declaration earlier this year that he would extend automatic green cards to foreign students who earned a degree from a U.S. college.

“If you graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” Mr. Trump said on the “All-In Podcast” this summer.

The declaration even seemed to surprise his campaign, which swooped in to say the plan might not be so generous and should apply only to highly skilled graduates in critical fields of study.

Immigration activists say they think the campaign is closer to the reality than Mr. Trump’s comments.

“We never saw him move any pro-immigration policies while in office,” Ms. Murray said.

She has higher hopes for Ms. Harris to follow Mr. Biden’s approach, which would speed up work-based visas, reduce backlogs and eliminate country visa caps that have limited legal immigration.

The two candidates would also likely differ on the treatment of refugees.

When in office, Mr. Trump slashed the number resettled by the U.S., arguing the country needed a pause while it tried to work through the massive backlog of asylum cases already in the pipeline here.

Mr. Biden has gone the other way, setting a three-decade high for refugees in the just-completed fiscal year 2024, while also unleashing a massive asylum surge.

Experts said they would expect Ms. Harris to continue Mr. Biden’s open refugee policy while a new Trump administration would ratchet things down again.

Mr. Trump has also revived his idea, first mooted during his time in the White House, of trying to curtail birthright citizenship through executive action. Most scholars who looked at the issue believe it would take a constitutional amendment instead.

Interior

The biggest difference between the two candidates lies in how they would approach the millions of illegal immigrants already here — including an estimated 4 million that have arrived and settled on Ms. Harris’s watch.

She hasn’t offered a specific plan but has suggested full legalization for at least some of those groups, including farm workers and “Dreamers,” who came to the U.S. as children. She also touts the Biden administration’s legalization framework submitted to Congress in early 2021, which envisioned a broad amnesty for most of the illegal immigrant population.

Mr. Trump counters with an aggressive agenda of enforcement whose biggest question is how far he can go before he hits insurmountable legal, political or structural hurdles.

He has called for mass deportations, with his advisors saying they would first focus on those with criminal records. That would require the kind of resources Congress has, to date, never been willing to provide, as well as new battles with sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate in assisting deportations.

The former president also has a complicated history with the Dreamers.

He tried to end the Obama-era DACA program that granted deportation amnesty to hundreds of thousands of them. But in 2018 he also angered many on his political right by proposing a bill to grant an amnesty — a full pathway to citizenship — to Dreamers in exchange for funding for his border wall and limits to some categories of legal immigration.

That idea was rejected by congressional Democrats who said they couldn’t stomach the tradeoffs Mr. Trump was seeking in exchange for the amnesty.

Mr. Trump, during his previous time in office, also tried to end Temporary Protected Status for nations that have been in the program for years. Those efforts were stymied by federal courts.

Immigrant rights advocates expect Mr. Trump to renew those efforts if he regains the White House.