Former Biden border advisor Blas Nuñez-Neto published a New York Times opinion Tuesday about the state of U.S. immigration policy, pointing to the broken system that continues to fuel border crises.
In a post titled “Want to Fix the Border? Fix Asylum,” Nuñez-Neto, who served as assistant secretary for Border and Immigration Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, offered a firsthand account of the ongoing challenges at the U.S.-Mexico border and the urgent need for bipartisan reform. Nuñez-Neto said the surge in illegal crossings during the first three years of the Biden administration, which peaked in 2021, was undeniable.
Nuñez-Neto said that failing to address the issue eroded trust in the Democratic Party. He framed the crisis as one heavily tied to the nation’s asylum system, which has encouraged economic migrants to exploit the system by claiming persecution, a loophole he said needs immediate legislative correction.
“I had a front row view of all this in my role as the assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security,” Nuñez-Neto wrote. “I learned that the border crisis is, to a large extent, an asylum crisis: Our broken immigration laws have increasingly incentivized economic migrants to claim that they fear persecution in order to start a lengthy administrative process that allows them to remain in the United States and work.”
Nuñez-Neto argued that U.S. immigration laws are outdated, having been crafted decades ago when the predominant flow of migrants was seasonal labor from Mexico. The present system, he said, now forces migrants to seek asylum instead of following lawful, temporary work pathways, leading to a complicated and unsustainable status quo.
Despite numerous attempts by both Democratic and Republican presidents to manage immigration through executive action, Nuñez-Neto said true reform must come from Congress. He criticized both parties for allowing immigration to remain a divisive political issue rather than addressing the underlying structural issues.
House lawmakers are now investigating the role that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) played in facilitating the illegal immigration crisis during the Biden administration. The Homeland Security Committee’s probe follows an unprecedented border crisis. Fiscal years 2023 and 2024 marked the worst and second-worst years in nationwide migrant encounters, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.
The Biden-Harris administration saw roughly 8.5 million migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border over four fiscal years, according to CBP data. An analysis by The New York Times said Biden presided over the largest net migration in U.S. history, surpassing even the massive migration surges of the 1800s and early 1900s.
While President Donald Trump succeeded in restoring order to the U.S.-Mexico border, questions remain about how the crisis unfolded and who funded it. GOP members of the House Homeland Security Committee allege that numerous NGOs received large payments from the Biden administration while facilitating the flow of illegal migrants.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)
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