Blas Nuñez-Neto served under President Biden as a top immigration official, including in his role as the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Border and Immigration Policy. In 2024, as Biden sought to strike a bipartisan deal with Republicans in the U.S. Senate, he was also tasked with negotiating between both them and the White House.
But that deal fell through. Donald Trump, then in his second presidential run, lobbied lawmakers to back out of those bipartisan negotiations and let the deal fall through in Congress.
Over the course of the Biden Administration, Blas played a pivotal role in ensuring that Democrats took border security seriously — especially as a surge of illegal immigration began to overwhelm the U.S.-Mexico border in the early part of Biden’s presidency. The Washington Post went on to call him “The quiet technocrat who steered Biden’s effort to tighten the border.”
Now a senior fellow at Searchlight, Blas leads our immigration and border security policy. He recently published his latest Substack piece ‘Border Security is National Security,’ as well as ‘NO MORE BACK DOORS,’ a comprehensive plan to reshape federal immigration law and enforcement.
Border security is national security
A country’s ability to secure its border must be a primary component of its national security strategy and its foreign policy. This fact seems obvious: keeping dangerous people and products from entering the country is a prerequisi…
I sat down with Blas to discuss Searchlight’s 11-point plan to regain the public’s trust on the issues of immigration and border security. We also spoke about the need for more Democrats to take Independent and swing voters seriously when they say border security remains a top priority of theirs.
Part of that need centers on the question of immigration enforcement in our nation’s interior. Calls to ‘abolish ICE’ have taken hold in the wake of chaos and violence in Minnesota — including the killing of two Americans, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
Blas made clear that ICE’s abuses and cruelty must be reined in, reiterating the points he had first raised in a memo shared with Democrats in Congress earlier in January. (First reported by Lauren Egan of The Bulwark.)
To many Americans, I can imagine there must be an overall perception that our nation’s federal immigration strategy has — in recent years — oscillated between ‘chaos’ on one end and cruelty on the other. “People don’t like to see chaos,” Blas said.
Blas himself is an immigrant. Born in Argentina, he came to the United States when he was ten years old following the nation’s democratic transition after the Dirty War. (My father is an immigrant, too. He was raised in the south of Lebanon and later in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.)
We ended our conversation with optimism that leaders in Washington can, with the right focus and motivation, improve our broken immigration system — and that America today remains just as much a home for immigrants as it did before.
