January 28, 2022
In the spring of 2019, Andrea Flores, then a thirty-one-year-old associate at a law firm in Washington, D.C., received an e-mail from the head of an organization called National Security Action. Its mission sounded lofty and urgent, and also typical for the time: “advancing American global leadership” and “opposing the reckless policies of the Trump Administration.” What distinguished National Security Action was that it would soon become a laboratory for the Biden transition. Flores, who’d worked in the Obama White House, was seen as an expert on immigration and border policy. She was also still young by the standards of the profession. Consulting with National Security Action put her in élite company. “It exposed my ideas to a much broader group,” she told me. “Usually, you work in your field and share your ideas with mentors. I never thought to diversify in this way.”
Over the next year, she wrote position papers and participated in strategy sessions over conference calls. At one point, while sitting at home on a Zoom call with Madeleine Albright, it occurred to her that she might get a position in the next Presidential Administration. Last January,
Joe Biden entered office having made concrete promises to humanize American immigration policy. Flores was hired as the director of border management on Biden’s National Security Council, an influential body that was traditionally white and male. For Flores, it was a source of pride to be one of the few high-ranking women of color. “There’s an expectation, too often, that all the Black and brown people go to domestic policy and that they don’t understand these other issues,” she said. “It was a dream role for me.”
Her first task was to fulfill one of Biden’s explicit promises on the campaign trail: to end a Trump-era policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols, or M.P.P., which had forced more than sixty thousand migrants to wait in Mexico after they applied for asylum at the border. In effect, migrants who had fled violence and poverty in their home countries had become stuck in some of the most dangerous parts of Mexico, where criminals and extortionists targeted them with impunity. During the next seven months, Flores orchestrated a process that allowed thirteen thousand migrants, many of whom had spent the better part of two years in makeshift encampments, to enter the U.S. “No one heard about it because it ran so smoothly,” an Administration official told me. Another White House official said, of the effort, “This was how government was supposed to work. Andrea was in charge, and it was beautiful to watch.”
But before Flores could finish the job she was called off. In August, 2021, a lawsuit filed by two Republican attorneys general reached a Trump-appointed federal judge, in Texas, who ordered the government to reinstate M.P.P. Biden’s Department of Justice appealed, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, reissued a memo laying out the case for terminating M.P.P. (It had “endemic flaws, imposed unjustifiable human costs, pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts, and failed to address root causes of irregular migration,” he has said.) But the effort was rebuffed in the conservative Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene. By the end of the year, D.H.S. had reinstated the policy. To Flores, the rush to comply seemed to betray a willingness on the part of the White House to reassert tough measures at the border. “Why launch it before you devise new and creative housing solutions for migrants?” Flores wondered. “Why launch it before you have a case-oversight mechanism?” (A White House spokesperson said it was “false and wrong” to imply that the Administration could have taken more time to deliberate. One of the Republican attorneys general, he said, had filed an additional motion “arguing that the Administration was not acting quickly enough.”)
Flores had already begun looking for work elsewhere. If she stayed at the White House after the court rulings, her new task would be reimplementing, rather than dismantling, a policy that she despised. Since the program was restarted, more than two hundred asylum seekers have been sent back to Mexico. Roughly ninety per cent of them are from Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Cuba. Other migrants are being expelled under a different Trump policy, called Title 42, which prevents people from applying for asylum altogether on the ground that they would pose a health risk during
the pandemic. Public-health experts roundly oppose Title 42, but Biden has
decided to leave it in place.
From the start of Biden’s Presidency, Republicans have accused him of being too lax at the border. Last year, as apprehensions by Border Patrol increased, the attacks intensified. Some White House officials began to question the political wisdom of the President’s agenda. Plans made during the transition to restart asylum processing at ports of entry were put on hold. At one point, the White House deputy chief of staff was tasked with conducting analyses of how much political fallout Biden could sustain if he angered his base on the issue.
This past fall, Flores left the Administration; other high-profile departures followed. According to three current and former Administration officials, the resistance to
easing Trump-era restrictions came from the very top of the White House chain of command:
Ron Klain, the chief of staff; Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council; and Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser. “None of them is an immigration expert,” one of the officials told me. “The immigration experts who were brought in—all those people are not the ones controlling the policy direction. That should tell you something right there. The ones who are at the highest level are political people.”
After Biden’s election, I tried multiple times to convince Flores to speak with me about the Administration’s immigration policy. I knew her only by reputation. During Trump’s final year in office, she worked at the American Civil Liberties Union, overseeing its portfolio on the border. Word that she was serving on Biden’s transition team generated optimism among sources I knew, who saw her role in the Administration as a sign that the President was serious about charting a new course. For the next ten months, though, Flores ignored me. We finally met only after she’d left the White House, for a wary drink at a tiki bar near the Capitol.
Flores is short, with dark, curly hair and a relaxed, extroverted manner. Her speech—casual, chatty—is inflected with the argot of the Washington policy circuit. (“There’s a big delta between the political expectations and the policy choices,” she told me, over a piña colada.) Her rationale for opening up was bittersweet. She’d recently started a job in the Senate, as the chief counsel to Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, which meant that she was no longer constrained from sharing her views. And yet the freedom of her job with Menendez—a senator with a respected track record on immigration policy and a reputation for outspokenness—was nevertheless a reminder of how far she now was from the levers of executive power.
Anyone working in public policy has to weigh a sense of principle against the realities of political influence. For Flores, striking that balance has defined her entire career. The daughter of a psychiatrist and an educator, both of whom are Mexican American, she grew up in the borderlands, in a small city in New Mexico called Las Cruces. She went east for college—to Harvard, where she became the first Latina to be elected student-body president—determined to return home and work in state politics. Her first job after graduation was for Harry Teague, a Democratic congressman and former oil executive who represented a conservative district in the southern half of the state. What Flores remembers most about her time there was how frequently she was pulled over and questioned by Border Patrol agents en route to work.
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