US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has underscored her restrictive approach to immigration in a town hall with undecided Latino voters, a testament to her embrace of hawkish border policies as she comes under attack from the right on immigration.

Seeking to strike a balance between a tough approach and empathy towards immigrants, Harris chastised rival Donald Trump for telling Republican lawmakers not to back a bill supported by the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden that would roll back access to asylum and pour more resources into border militarisation.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” Harris told a tearful audience member, in response to a question about the hardships faced by undocumented people who spend decades in the US without gaining access to citizenship or basic services.

“There are real people who are suffering because of an inability to put solutions in front of politics,” she added, calling the US immigration system “broken”.

The town hall, hosted and broadcast by the Spanish-language network Univision and held in Las Vegas, Nevada, comes as Democrats have been losing ground with Latino voters, once a reliably blue voting block.

While Harris continues to lead Trump with that section of the electorate, a recent poll by NBC News and Telemundo showed Democrats’ advantage with Latino voters has declined to its lowest level in the past four presidential cycles.

The poll put support for Harris at 54 percent among registered Latino voters, while Trump got 40 percent and another 6 percent said they were undecided.

Trump, whose own Univision town hall in Florida was postponed because of Hurricane Milton, famously called Mexicans “rapists” and “drug dealers” in his first presidential campaign — one of many insults he directed at immigrants and Hispanics.

But some Hispanic voters have turned to the Republican Party in recent years and this election cycle, citing immigration, the economy, and the rising cost of living as top priorities they see Trump as more likely to tackle.

“If there is an erosion of support in 2024, even if the Democrats win the race, which I hope they do, I think they need to ask themselves some very hard questions about how and what they’re doing to engage Hispanic voters,” Fernand Amandi, a Hispanic pollster in Miami, told Al Jazeera.

He said Harris was handicapped by her late entry into the race.

“It’s a shame because I think what she has proven is that she is an excellent campaigner…I’m sure had she had more time and ability, she would have engaged in a more robust way than she’s able to now at this stage,” he said.

“What we’ve learned in previous cycles is that you can’t just do a last-minute appeal to the Hispanic electorate and think that that’s going to do the trick,” he added. “It requires time, cultivation, engagement, and sustainment.”

Immigration and the economy

Another recent survey of Hispanic voters in 22 states conducted by Florida International University and the marketing firm Adsmovil found that 45 percent of those polled prefer Democrats when it comes to immigration, with 29 percent saying that Republicans are better on the issue.

Hispanic voters identify immigration and “open borders” as the biggest threat to the country’s national security, the survey found.

But polls also show Latino voters torn over the state of an economy hit hard by inflation that tends to impact lower income families hardest.

“It appears that Latinos may continue to slide further towards Trump,” Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican in California and host of The Latino Vote podcast, told Al Jazeera.

“Latino voters are rapidly defying the conventional stereotype of who we have typically considered them to be. Latinos are moving away from race and ethnic issues like immigration and towards economic populist and pocketbook issues,” he added.

As the nation’s largest minority group — 19.5 percent of the total population, according to the 2020 census — Latinos form a steadily growing voting bloc in what’s shaping up to be a tight presidential election. While hardly monolithic, the Latino vote is crucial in some battleground states like Florida, Arizona and Nevada. Trump won Florida in 2020 thanks also to a wave of support from Hispanic and Latino voters.

“There are more than 36 million Hispanics eligible to vote in the US, making them the largest minority in the country,” Daniel Coronell, president of Noticias Univision, said in a statement prior to the town hall. “[They have] the power to influence the outcome of the race for the White House and the future of the nation”.

Hombres con Harris 

As she courts Hispanic voters, Harris has especially focused on men, the group more likely to turn to Trump. Her campaign began a group this week known as “Hombres con Harris”.

The campaign has also aimed to reach Hispanic voters who may not be closely following the election by doing things like having Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Harris’s campaign manager, attend the recent boxing match between Canelo Alvarez and Edgar Berlanga in Las Vegas, and holding events at churches and elsewhere to mark Mexican Independence Day in September.

Harris’s campaign also announced last month that it was spending $3m on Spanish-language radio advertisements and focusing on sporting events, such as baseball games and boxing matches.

Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, attended an Hombres kickoff event with Arizona Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego and actor Jaime Camil in Phoenix, Arizona on Wednesday. Similar gatherings were held elsewhere in Arizona, as well as in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

More than six in 10 Latinos voters supported Biden in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, and 35 percent supported Trump. However, a July poll from the Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research found only about four in 10 Latinos said they were somewhat or very optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party, and about one-quarter said the same about the Republican Party.

Harris regaining ground

Harris has recovered some of the Latino votes lost by Biden, according to a Univision News/YouGov poll from August. She has also won the endorsement of the League of United Latin American Citizens — the first time the country’s oldest Latino civil rights group has endorsed a presidential candidate since its founding in 1929.

“We can trust them to do what is right for our community and the country,” Domingo Garcia, chairman of LULAC Adelante PAC and LULAC’s immediate past president, said in a statement. “The politics of hate mongering and scapegoating Latinos and immigrants must be stopped!”