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.
When Teague lost a reëlection bid, in the fall of 2010, Flores moved to Washington, eventually finding a position in the Obama Administration. Her first boss was Alejandro Mayorkas, who was then the head of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Flores was twenty-three, working as one of his assistants on policy. “It was extremely technical: H-1B lotteries, T.P.S. extensions, citizenship forms—a lot of forms,” she said. “It was fascinating.”
Flores helped on a project to offer immigration guidance to startups, but, in 2012, its launch was delayed. “Reëlection concerns,” she told me. “The Administration would be signalling that we were trying to bring in more immigrants in an election year.” This skittishness upset her, but the announcement of another policy soon restored her faith in President Obama’s willingness to take calculated risks. It was called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which granted special legal status to some seven hundred thousand immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. When Obama presented the policy in the Rose Garden, on the afternoon of June 15th, 2012, Flores wept. “You don’t forget those days,” she told me.
The period after Obama’s reëlection was marked by high promise. Flores accepted a job at the White House to work on a comprehensive immigration-reform bill, which Obama saw as a major legislative priority of his second term. She was the youngest member of a team of seasoned policy experts—Cecilia Muñoz, Felicia Escobar, Esther Olavarria, and Tyler Moran—whose intelligence and experience dazzled her. She spent a single week in the White House before moving to a war-room-style office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. “I was a de-facto Senate staffer,” she said. There were committee hearings followed by intense floor debates; technical questions arose constantly, and Flores would scramble to come up with answers, shuttling between stakeholders, legal authorities, and Hill staffers. “Because of the way comprehensive immigration reform is structured, you have to learn everything: seasonal-worker issues, border policy, E-Verify,” she told me. “I was a coördinator at the nerve center.”
There were enough votes in the Senate for the bill to pass, but the odds were slimmer in the House, which the Republicans controlled. Chuck Schumer, one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors, was trying to turn up the pressure on John Boehner, the House Speaker, by securing more votes. He brokered a deal with two Republican senators, from North Dakota and Tennessee, who wanted the government to hire an additional twenty thousand Border Patrol agents. For these senators it was pure optics; they’d support the bill as long as they could appear to strengthen “border security.” Flores, being from the borderlands herself, considered the move bad politics and worse policy. “You do it because you have a pretty racialized view of the border,” Flores said. “You do it because you’re accepting the Republican framework.”
The immigration-reform bill, which would have conferred legal status to eleven million undocumented immigrants, passed the Senate on Flores’s twenty-fifth birthday. But it quickly became clear that Boehner would refuse to hold a vote on it in the House. “One of the happiest days of my career was also the saddest,” Flores later wrote, in a book chapter about her time in the Obama White House. “Even though we had made the enormous compromise,” she said, “no amount of harsh enforcement from Democrats would convince Republicans.”
In 2015, Flores joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign, while also attending law school at Columbia University. The tone inside the campaign, she said, was combative, bitter, and endlessly calculating. Advisers deliberated at great length about whether it made sense to call Trump an outright racist, or if embracing Black Lives Matter would alienate voters. It was considered a settled matter, she said, that the candidate shouldn’t emphasize “immigration issues, Latino issues, or women’s issues” until after the Iowa caucuses. (A representative for the Clinton campaign called this account “patently false,” noting that the candidate “mentioned these issues regularly, and in both tone and frequency never shied away.”)
Flores has always been much less of an agitator than some of her peers assume her to be based on her identity. “It’s O.K. if immigration’s not an electoral issue,” she told me, describing her outlook at the time. “It’s not a universal issue for Americans. But we should have a plan and be able to answer what we’ll do.” During the campaign, she was frequently chastised for “being too close to the issue.” One superior told her, “You just don’t understand politics.”
The years that followed Clinton’s defeat demonstrated just how personal Flores’s professional interests were. She was in Washington, in August, 2019, when a white nationalist opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, killing twenty-three people and injuring some two dozen others. Almost all of the victims were Mexican or Mexican American. The shooter, who’d allegedly written a manifesto that echoed Trump’s rhetoric, was targeting Latinos. The Walmart that he chose to terrorize was known, in this stretch of the borderlands, as “the Mexican Walmart.” The strip mall where it was situated attracted shoppers from Mexico and nearby cities, including Las Cruces. Flores’s parents had planned to eat lunch across the street that very afternoon. “That’s the mall we’ve been going to my whole life,” she told me. “There was a victim that day named Maria Flores, which is my mom’s name.”
No one from Flores’s family was hurt, but it was clear that Trump was making life at the border more dangerous. “There was always this feeling that I could go home and feel safe again,” Flores said. “When you see what happened in El Paso, it destroyed that vision for me. When we dehumanize people at the border, my community gets dehumanized in the process. In this environment, it becomes a security risk for all of us.”
After the El Paso massacre, Flores joined the A.C.L.U., becoming the organization’s deputy director of immigration policy. She’d always been an impassioned critic of Trump, but now she had a national platform. “The President is hellbent on exploiting a public health crisis to achieve his long-held goal of ending asylum at the border,” she said, in a May, 2020, statement about Title 42. “He’s also doubling down on fear-mongering against immigrants, so many of whom are essential workers during this crisis. Do not be fooled.”
Around this time, Flores was contributing to early discussions among the Biden transition team. Cecilia Muñoz, who was tapped to lead part of the process, had brought her on to discuss immigration policy. Jake Sullivan, who would become Biden’s national-security adviser, saw the issue as a top priority. It was “an extremely receptive audience,” Flores told me. “They were following family separation. They had a high awareness of M.P.P. They were really concerned with what they were watching in Europe—how right-wing politicians were using immigration as a political tool to win elections, just as Trump had. There was an understanding that immigration was becoming this democracy issue.”
When Flores was hired at the National Security Council, in January, 2021, one of the first things she was told was that “we’re not going to end Title 42, but we are going to end M.P.P.” From an operational standpoint, she accepted the need for a cautious approach. “It was understood that the numbers [of arriving migrants] were going to go up, and it was understood that we didn’t have the facilities to deal with them,” she said. “You couldn’t reverse everything on Day One. The whole ecosystem would have collapsed.”
There were advantages to starting with M.P.P. The population it affected was large but finite. Everyone was known to the government. The challenge was finding them, explaining what was happening, testing them for Covid, and then “paroling” them into the U.S., through an official port of entry, for a future court hearing. At the start of the pandemic, the Trump Administration had virtually stopped processing people for asylum, so the White House was starting from scratch. Members of the transition suggested bringing in U.N. agencies to help deal with some of the logistics. “Smart politics, smart operations,” Flores said. “I was excited. I was nervous. How do you do this in an orderly way that doesn’t trigger more migration during a pandemic?”
During the Trump years, a network of faith leaders, shelters, and legal-service providers had “assumed a quasi-governmental function” at the border, Flores said. These were groups like the Florence Project, Jewish Family Services, Annunciation House, and Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. Some officials at D.H.S. were wary of working with advocacy groups, but Flores wanted to partner with them. “They knew the people who were waiting in M.P.P. by name,” she said. “They knew their stories. They knew what they’ve been through.” Each section of the border is a world unto itself—the dynamics in the Rio Grande Valley are different from those in West Texas—and no one had a better sense of these locales than the advocates working there. Flores told me, “You go to the groups serving each sector, and have a sector lead for San Diego, for Arizona, and so on. You had to look at the border in pieces, instead of just one border-wide approach.”
In February, 2021, when the process was set to begin, it was the border groups, rather than skeptics inside the Administration, who told Flores that the government wasn’t ready. They advised her to scale back the initial plans and to narrow the first group of asylum applicants that she planned to bring across the border. On February 19th, the Biden Administration paroled in twenty-seven people. “There were thirty thousand people who were eligible at that point, and we started with twenty-seven,” she told me. “It was a full seventy-two-hour affair for me, around the clock. We made sure these people were Covid-tested, that we put out explanations to the public about what was happening and about Covid protocols.” The opening move, though modest, served as a proof of concept for Flores’s approach. She scheduled sets of daily and weekly meetings on Zoom with allies in the White House, State Department, and D.H.S. Between twenty and thirty people were on every call, including some of the career officials who’d set up M.P.P two years before. Flores gave the project a name: the M.P.P. “wind-down.”
They started in San Diego, then planned to move on to El Paso, Brownsville, and Laredo. As Flores and her team were working, another humanitarian emergency began to play out: thousands of unaccompanied children were arriving at the border, overwhelming federal authorities. The meetings and daily coördination, however, helped Flores and her colleagues stay on track. “We were in such close alignment with the ports that D.H.S. could call me up and say we need to only do fifty people today, because we have a lot of kids coming through,” Flores told me. “We’d do that with enough lead time to give people an expectation.”
In late February, the working group began closing a refugee camp in Matamoros—across the border from Brownsville—which had become a symbol of the immiserated conditions that M.P.P. had forced migrants into. Winter storms had recently devastated Texas. Officials at the White House worked with local nonprofits and the mayor’s office in Brownsville to arrange transportation to shelters, and coördinated with representatives from the Mexican government to address security concerns. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Flores said, of the operation.
The bigger problem was that a sizable population of people in M.P.P. had had their asylum cases closed without their knowledge. This was inevitable, given how the policy worked in practice. Its premise was that asylum seekers would travel across the border, or to a provisional tent court, each time they had a hearing before a judge. But criminal groups routinely descended on migrant encampments in northern Mexico. Thousands of asylum seekers ultimately missed their court dates, either because they couldn’t safely make it back to a port of entry or because they’d been abducted. “We had to find the appropriate legal mechanism to reopen their cases,” Flores said. “Would we be able to do that fast enough for everyone to make it into the U.S. before violence erupts?”
The U.N.’s refugee agency, U.N.H.C.R., helped the Administration find a church where dozens of migrants whose cases had been closed could wait while the Matamoros camp was emptied. ICE reopened their cases, and weeks later almost all of them were brought across the border. Flores said, “It was exactly what I hoped to do in my career, the type of intense collaboration between a border community and the federal government.”
Inside the White House, Flores was earning a mixed reputation, in spite of all that she was accomplishing. She had clashed with her first boss over the timing and other technical aspects of the M.P.P. wind-down. Some of her superiors cautioned her about “personnel problems” that kept interfering with the high quality of her work: she was told that she was “too intense” or “too close to the issues,” and that she had a habit of turning disagreements into ad-hominem conflicts. Flores told me, “I was always going to be seen as extra suspicious, and not just because of my ideas.”
She recalled many times in her career when someone had politely but firmly told her that she needed to be more dispassionate on immigration issues. “My name is Flores, and on the first impression many people believe that my family recently arrived in the United States,” she told me. “That caused doubts. People assume I’m a bleeding heart before they hear my ideas, and that’s always been a challenge.”
There were moments, Flores said, when she felt as if she were “crazy” for having doubts about how she was being perceived. It only confused matters further when Biden’s immigration agenda started to stall, in the face of political and legal opposition. At all levels of the White House, there were feelings of general frustration and mistrust. Flores was an immediate target of suspicion: she was accused of leaking information to the press, an allegation that was news to me. Other officials certainly were leaking in order to complain about “progressives” who were bogging down Biden’s agenda with unrealistic expectations. One official told me that, inside the Administration, people with dissenting opinions were asked, “Did this come from Andrea?”
Biden’s incoming agenda was a high-wire act: prevent and discourage migrants from crossing the border in between ports of entry, while slowly rebuilding the government’s capacity for handling asylum seekers. Flores saw the M.P.P. wind-down as a model for an orderly process at the ports. But, through the spring and summer, the White House wavered. “Senior leadership was saying that we were letting in too many people,” Flores told me. She wasn’t regularly briefing the President or his principal advisers, but, before top-level meetings, she would suggest to her superiors that they bring up the issue of expanding asylum access. According to Flores, the response would often be “No, they do not want to hear about more people coming in.” When I asked her who “they” were, she mentioned Ron Klain and Susan Rice.
Flores was also growing increasingly uneasy about Title 42, which had closed the border to new asylum seekers during the pandemic. A number of political appointees and career officials shared her concerns about the policy. It had always rested on a dubious premise: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had instituted it, in March, 2020, under heavy pressure from the Trump White House. (The C.D.C.’s top doctor had objected, and Mike Pence went over his head, to the director of the agency.) The Biden Administration had insisted that it would leave the measure in place only temporarily. Flores told me that, at the end of the winter of 2021, “I started to think about contingency planning for Title 42.”
She knew that the issue was complicated both operationally and politically. To anyone determined to keep immigration out of the news, Title 42 could seem like a useful tool for clearing the border. Its seductiveness as a policy was a trap, however. “It is a non-process process,” one Administration official told me. Instead of setting goals for expanding asylum access, or bringing some order to ports of entry, the government resorted to an ad-hoc approach of expelling as many migrants as it could. It was also proof, as Flores put it, that on immigration Trump had successfully shifted the debate. “What’s in the Immigration and Nationality Act”—the country’s main body of immigration laws—“isn’t good enough anymore,” she said. “We don’t want to have to process people at all. Can’t we just turn them away? That’s the Title 42 process.”
In the spring, as COVID case numbers dropped, “it seemed like we were going to have a window for doing this in a smart way,” Flores told me. In order to address confusion over Title 42, she thought that the Administration should consult with service providers at the border, just as it had done in winding down M.P.P. The Administration was already seeing a spike in border crossings: because migrants were immediately expelled, tens of thousands of them simply tried again. Encampments were forming in Tijuana and Reynosa. Flores said, “We had made this commitment on Matamoros, and these two new ones were growing.”
Because the Administration had abandoned its initial strategy of scaling up asylum access at ports of entry, the government’s capacity at the border hadn’t grown even modestly. The rise of the Delta variant further complicated plans to phase out Title 42. The withdrawal from Afghanistan brought more pressure, as the government prepared to handle tens of thousands of refugees. And White House turnover was also becoming an issue. “The teams kept changing,” Flores said. It felt to her that she was spending all of her time in meetings, rehashing obvious problems but never making progress on them. In her ten months at the White House, she reported to four different bosses. “It was like I started my job four times,” she told me.
In the summer, a new kind of chaos was setting in. D.H.S. was relying on a practice that it calls lateral flights, by which it arrested and flew asylum seekers to different border locations, from which it was then easier to expel them back to Mexico. The policy was the worst of all possible outcomes: it was cruel and random. Of a hundred and thirty-five people placed on a lateral flight, thirty-five might be released into the U.S. “It was so out of alignment with what we were trying to accomplish,” Flores told me. “There was not really an order or a policy around it. It was sort of a decongestion measure.”
In September, by which point the Biden Administration had already made some seven hundred thousand expulsions, it invoked Title 42 yet again to break up a camp of Haitian asylum seekers who’d gathered under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The public outcry grew so intense that Chuck Schumer called on Biden to end Title 42 altogether. (“It’s a decision that’s made by the Centers for Disease Control,” the White House spokesperson told me.) Flores was despondent. She said, “It was the first time in my eleven years of working on immigration policy that my closest friends in life called to ask, ‘Is this really what you want to be doing?’ ”
One of the last times that I spoke to Flores at length was right before the holidays, during a pileup of more bad news. The Senate parliamentarian had just rejected the Democrats’ proposal to include immigration reform in the budget-reconciliation process. M.P.P. was back in effect. The border-area service providers, which Flores considered so important, were now saying that they no longer trusted the Biden Administration. D.O.J. lawyers, meanwhile, were preparing to defend the continued use of Title 42 in arguments before the Supreme Court, in a lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. New encampments south of the border were expanding, as confused migrants tried to figure out their next moves.
Flores was angry and exasperated, but I was struck by her absence of bitterness. She could speak for hours, and in full, ordered paragraphs, about policy mistakes she felt that she was observing—“the opportunities I saw them not take,” as she put it. But she also didn’t think that it was too late for Biden to revive his earlier vision. Her relentlessness on this point brought to mind something one of her former White House colleagues told me: “Her significance was that she could see around the corner, beyond the issue of the day. There’s no one doing that on M.P.P. or Title 42 currently. Every day that goes by with M.P.P. in place is a day when they forget what they intended to do, and what they said they’d do. There is an alternative path forward.”
An image kept replaying in Flores’s mind, from when they’d closed the camp at Matamoros. “The residents of the camp were getting haircuts before they came into the United States,” she told me. “I couldn’t believe that, after two years of a country forcing you to live in those conditions, you wanted to look your best when you came in.” Ultimately, Flores had helped thirteen thousand people enter the U.S. for their hearings—a major feat. But she couldn’t stop thinking about everyone who’d been left behind.
She could see all kinds of ways for the Administration to prioritize their cases without violating the Fifth Circuit’s order to resume M.P.P. Paroling people in was the government’s prerogative, she said. She suggested that I speak to a group of lawyers who were “making some very smart” arguments about how to interpret the Fifth Circuit’s decision, which she saw as an “infringement on the executive’s diplomatic relationship with Mexico.” Another detail she highlighted was that the courts had told Biden to implement their orders to resume M.P.P. “in good faith.” The phrase left some room for the government to maneuver. Biden could build in safeguards to protect asylum seekers and expedite their cases in immigration court. The “good faith” language, she said, “opened the door to a different version of M.P.P. than what we’re seeing today.” Bob Menendez’s office, for its part, would continue to push the White House. The senator recently told CNN, “The Biden-Harris Administration cannot run away from immigration policy.” The work, Flores told me, was “deeply unfinished.”
Note: An earlier version of this article misstated Chuck Schumer’s role in the Senate in 2013.
