Jonathan Blitzer writes:

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. [Continue reading…]