Since the Obama years, Andrea Flores, an attorney and immigration policy expert, has worked with Democrats on immigration strategy at the national level. During the Biden administration, she served as director of border management on the National Security Council but left in frustration after realizing that President Biden wasn’t going to roll back many of President Trump’s border policies from his first administration.
Raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Flores said that very few policymakers in Washington, D.C., truly understand the border. Democrats, she said, have continually failed to listen to border communities or create policies and messaging to counter Trump’s and MAGA’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and authoritarian agenda.
In this podcast, Flores talks about the culture within the Department of Homeland Security, which hamstrung the Biden administration’s efforts at reform, and the division within the administration over how to handle immigration policy changes, which led to confusion on the ground at the border. She also discusses how Democrats stood by while Trump and the MAGA media ecosystem set the national narrative for the border, helping Trump win the election.
“We thought we had the public with us, but we offered them nothing in terms of vision or explanation of what we were trying to build,” she said of Biden’s first year. “And I fear that could happen again if we just oppose everything President Trump is doing,” she said of Democrats, without offering new policy solutions or standing up for immigrants.
Recently, Flores launched a Substack called America’s Promise as a forum where Democrats can discuss how to modernize the immigration system and create narratives countering the MAGA movement’s fear-based, anti-immigrant messaging, which has dominated the national discourse around migration and the border for years.
“My hope for the platform is that people feel better equipped to judge and expect more from their elected officials than just saying ‘I promise immigration reform.’ We’re going on decades of that promise, right? Get more specific,” Flores said. “Offer something connected to how it’s going to help people, especially American citizens. Because when you leave out American citizens from the immigration argument, you too often make it inadvertently an ‘us versus them’ issue. But immigrants are of our community. And when the system works well for them, it works well for Americans too.”
