Republicans want to label Kamala Harris as the border czar. And by just looking at a chart, you can see why. Border crossings were low when Donald Trump left office. But when President Biden is in the White House, they start shooting up and up — to numbers this country had never seen before, peaking in December 2023. Those numbers have fallen significantly since Biden issued tough new border policies. But that has still left Harris with a major vulnerability. Why didn’t the administration do more sooner? And why did border crossings skyrocket in the first place?
Harris was not the border czar; she had little power over policy. But to the extent that there is a border czar, it’s the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain what’s happened at the border the past few years — the record surge, the administration’s record and what it has revealed about our immigration system.
Mayorkas joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Ezra Klein: We had a significant surge in migrants at the southwestern border during the first three years of the Biden administration. We saw that peak at about 300,000 encounters last December, the most ever recorded. What made so many more people decide to take the dangerous journey to the United States between 2021 and 2023?
Alejandro Mayorkas: We have to put that question in its historical context. First and foremost, it is the postpandemic years — I should say the peak year of 2020. And there was a tremendous pent-up desire to leave the conditions in which people found themselves — violence, financial insecurity, corruption, extreme weather events, totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, the consistent drivers of displacement.
We’ve seen an unprecedented level of displacement around the world. It’s the greatest level of displacement since at least World War II. And the United States came out of the pandemic more rapidly than did other countries in our hemisphere. The economy recovered more rapidly. So not only were the forces of displacement present — and some unprecedented — but the attraction of the United States was greatest.
I take your point on the pandemic, though border crossings really rise most sharply in 2023 — not 2022 or even 2021. But if you look over the past 50, 75 years, there are many points of really significant and far worse poverty, certainly — of civil war, of murderous military juntas — that did not lead in those periods to this level of migration to America. So if it is the instability that is the cause, why is it so much worse now?
I’m not exactly in agreement with the fact that it’s the same level of instability. And there’s another force at play here, too, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But let’s take a look at two countries where the situation has changed, the first being Ecuador.
Ecuador historically has not been a source country of migration, has not suffered such a significant gang problem, has not suffered such a significant level of narco-trafficking. It was a transit country with respect to drugs, not a country of consumption. That has changed dramatically. President Daniel Noboa, early in his tenure, if not immediately upon entering office, declared a state of war internal to Ecuador. And we’re seeing a level of migration from Ecuador that we never previously have experienced.
Then, on the flip side, President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador imprisoned more than 70,000 suspected or confirmed gang members. The level of violence in El Salvador has plummeted. And the level of migration has plummeted correspondingly. In fact, some of the El Salvadoran diaspora have returned to El Salvador.
The other factor that is very different, if we look back as long as 50 years, is that we also have very organized, sophisticated smuggling organizations. No longer do we have the solo coyote or the loose affiliation of people moving others, but we have smuggling organizations that are true organizations and hierarchically established and the like. They’re very sophisticated, and they are using social media and online platforms to communicate to vulnerable people and facilitating their transit. And that is something that has grown exponentially. But it’s certainly different than even 15, 12 years ago.
I want to zoom in on that question of communication for a minute. What I didn’t understand about the rise of these transnational smuggling networks was the degree to which they act as marketers. It’s not just that you go to them in desperation and pay them. They’re actually telling you when to go. They’re trying to drum up business — “You have to go now before the U.S. does this policy change or before it stops having this new policy.”
There’s that, and then there’s also the rise of just telecommunications over WhatsApp and other messaging platforms, where people have a lot more information flowing back and forth from relatives who might already be settled in the U.S., from people who are making the journey right now. They see videos of them.
Tell me a bit about how that has changed the availability of information but also the ability to translate what might be a sort of inchoate desire to migrate into a plan that has architecture.
It is such an important point that you’re focused on. And let me say that when we speak of the dissemination of information more rapidly and more broadly than ever before, we’re not speaking exclusively of accurate information. To the contrary, there’s a tremendous level of disinformation that is being communicated.
The most insidious and tragic example of that is the smugglers communicating false information to intending migrants about the Darién, the land very difficult to traverse between Colombia and Panama. People are deceived into thinking that that journey will be quite facile. Some smugglers style themselves as tour guides, when, in fact, the journey is treacherous and sometimes tragically fatal. But the smugglers have a communication network on TikTok, WhatsApp, other platforms. They reach individuals who are either intending to migrate or who are considering migration. And they reach them very effectively.
On the other hand, there are individuals here in the United States who are able to remain in the United States during the pendency of their claims. And because our system is so broken and those proceedings languish for between sometimes seven and 10 years, they are communicating to their relatives about their ability to work the duration of their proceedings, and it’s attractive to others.
Let me hold on that for a minute. I grew up in Orange County, Calif., and when I grew up, there was a lot of talk of illegal immigration. And the sort of thing people were talking about — which also fit with the older coyotes, more individual smugglers — was somebody trying to sneak undetected across the border. That was the modal idea of what illegal immigration looked like. That’s where you get Donald Trump coming up with a wall: If people are physically moving across the border, create a physical barrier that stops them from doing so.
That has changed dramatically. And what people are doing is walking up to the border, getting caught on purpose or having an encounter on purpose with a Border Patrol agent and claiming asylum — and getting themselves into this process, which, as you say, is quite broken and leads to them often being inside the U.S. for five years, seven years, nine years, often with work authorization. Explain to me what led to that shift.
The smugglers know the system very well. They have the finger on the pulse, and they’re seeing an immigration court backlog only growing year over year. They are seeing the duration of immigration enforcement actions extending longer and longer, and they’re able to coach intending migrants that there’s not a need to evade law enforcement. Quite to the contrary: One can approach law enforcement, make a claim of credible fear — that initial threshold in an immigration case — have a high rate of success under the old standards.
We have changed them, and I know we’ll get to that in our conversation. But under the old standard, approximately 70 — and this is a generalization because it varies according to demographics, of course, but as a general matter, maybe 70 percent of the population that claimed credible fear had a successful claim. But ultimately, 20, 25 percent make a successful claim of asylum at the ultimate merits hearing. But the time in between the initial claim and the ultimate adjudication is many years. And so that realization, it was marketed and is marketed.
So what you’re saying in part is that once the smuggler networks realized the asylum system had broken, had become overwhelmed, it was then able to spread that knowledge in a different way and at a different level. This relies on an understanding of not just the American immigration policy system at a high level but of a problem within it. But when I was growing up in Orange County, was the asylum system not broken? Or was this just not a major factor in people’s considerations to migrate?
I think that the problem has gotten worse. The system is not built for a higher volume of people. So the pre-existing architecture just continues to break, and the backlogs continue to increase, and they increased in the prior administration, and they have increased now, of course, until this administration took certain actions.
The smuggling organizations have also changed the world of asylum writ large, because when I first encountered the system from a very, very different vantage point, prosecuting smugglers in federal court, back then the smugglers didn’t control the turf. They certainly traversed it, but individuals fleeing their home countries, they would get to the border wherever and however they could. Now, however, the smugglers control the land. The smugglers can control where and when individuals arrive. And I think the lens through which we consider asylum law has to take that into account.
You mentioned the actions the administration has undertaken to change this. I’d like to understand the before and after of this, and so I was hoping you might walk me through what would happen when a migrant comes and claims asylum in February of this year, before the June executive actions, and then now. What was the process, and how has that changed?
Let’s go back before this administration. The status quo has been as follows: An individual is encountered by the Border Patrol at the southern border, and an individual makes a claim for relief. They claim persecution by reason of their membership in a particular social group. And that has been an intentionally low bar to meet, based on the principle that we would not want to risk returning an individual to a place where, indeed, they are persecuted. Then they are placed in immigration. Their case is pending. And as the backlog has grown and grown, their, essentially, trial date, if you will — the date on which they will make their ultimate merits claim — is set years and years away. That was the status quo.
We took a number of measures. First, we sought, by way of regulation, to empower asylum officers, rather than immigration judges that are burdened by overwhelming dockets, to make the asylum adjudications.
The next major measure that we took was the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways regulation that said that if one does not avail oneself of the lawful pathways that we have built, there will be a presumption — albeit a rebuttable one — but a presumption of ineligibility for asylum.
And we premised that on the fact that we had indeed built very significant, safe, lawful and orderly pathways to reach the United States and access our humanitarian relief laws. We built CBP One, an app that allows people to make appointments at ports of entry and come at a preapproved time in an orderly and safe way.
We built a parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans that allowed as many as 30,000 individuals from those four countries to be vetted in advance and, if they have a sponsor in the United States, to actually travel safely to the United States via air.
And then we had the president’s proclamation, which basically said that the border — in between the ports of entry — is not the place to make an asylum claim; the lawful pathways are.
And over time we have built the capacity to process people far more rapidly. We raised the standard for that initial threshold of credible fear. We built the capability to return people to their countries of origin more rapidly, and we changed the risk calculus. Because if people think they have a 70 percent chance of success and an ability to stay in the United States for multiple years before their final adjudication, that informs a risk calculus. However, if one’s chance of success is far lower, then the question arises in an intending migrant’s mind: Do I spend my life savings to pay the smugglers? Do I risk my life on the dangerous journey in the hands of for-profit, rapacious individuals, ruthless individuals, for a far lower likelihood of success? The question is a very different one, and we have found the answer to be a very different one as well.
Wasn’t there also a dimension of these executive actions that shut down the process if encounters or claims on certain days were above certain levels — basically created a shut-off valve?
Yes, the president’s proclamation does have numeric limits. But “shutting off” is a bit of an overstatement because there are exceptions that account for certain exigencies and acute humanitarian needs. So if somebody, for example, is suffering a severe physical ailment that requires urgent medical care, that is an exception.
But rather than focusing on the exception, what is the basic rule?
The basic rule says that the border is not the place to make an asylum claim. The standard that one must meet has been heightened, and I think correctly so, as a matter of policy. I actually think it’s destabilizing — not only for our country, not only for the intentions of the asylum system, for the migrants themselves — to set an initial standard that is so disparate from the ultimate merits adjudication. I just think it’s a completely broken system. And so we close that gap by raising the standard.
And we also accelerated the adjudication process. People are subject to expedited removal. We try to conduct the adjudication while individuals are still in custody, and so we stop the perpetuation of this broken architecture, where people are able to stay, even with an inadequate case, unsatisfactory case, where they’re able to stay for years. That’s just a broken model.
So what has happened, as best we can tell, to the volume of migrants, the migrant flow, since June?
It has dropped dramatically. The number of individuals encountered at the southern border has dropped more than 50 percent. The current rate of encounter is lower than — the rate of encounter at the same time this year as in 2019 — lower than in 2019. But we’ve seen a more than 50 percent drop in the number of encounters, day to day. Dramatic.
This was somewhat surprising to me. When I was reporting on this back in February and trying to understand what was happening at the border more deeply, I was hearing a lot about hemispheric conditions — the economic instability, the gang rule, government collapse in places like Venezuela. And I understood the message of that to be, “This isn’t really up to us. How many people are coming to the border is not up to us. It reflects conditions in other places, and we can deal with it more or less humanely.” Then there was a bipartisan bill, which failed, and then the June executive actions. And the flow stopped — or at least seems to have halved or more than halved pretty rapidly. Which is interesting because it implies that we actually do have, through policy mechanisms, a fair amount of control. That if we change what we’re doing at the border, people’s risk calculation to migrate or not changes and that that is pretty sensitive to policy. How do you think about that?
I think that that is partly true. I do think the risk calculation is a correct framing. But it is not only our policies. We certainly are now essentially delivering a consequence regime that is realized far more rapidly than what previously was the case. And that is a material difference, but that is not all that we have done, and it’s very important to place the president’s proclamation, the executive action, our successful implementation of it — and I use the term “successful” because that’s a very material term, because we were able to implement it extremely rapidly, and the credit goes to the men and women in the Department of Homeland Security.
But there are other legs of the stool that are part of the equation. One is the fact that we have, indeed, presented to intending migrants with asylum claims alternative means of accessing humanitarian relief in the United States, and that’s very important as well. One can’t look at the executive action in isolation. One has to take a look at it in the context of a suite of efforts. It is the executive action itself. It is the lawful pathways that we have built, whether it’s CBP One; the Cuban, Haitian Nicaraguan, Venezuelan parole process; our family reunification processes with other populations; the safe mobility offices, essentially triage centers that we have established in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Costa Rica where people can come and make their claim for relief there, whether it be a claim for urgent humanitarian relief, whether it be a claim of refugee status, whether it be seeking to access our agricultural or nonagricultural unskilled labor visas under the H-2A and H-2B program. We have labor pathways not only to the United States but to other countries — Canada, Spain —
I wanted to interrupt on this because I feel you’re trying to complicate this away from the June actions. And I’m not saying these other actions were not important, but a lot of things you’re talking about happened much earlier. And the drop, which is sharp and disjunctive inside the data, follows the more enforcement-oriented executive actions of June.
Let me give you another leg, though. At the beginning, you said 300,000 people in December of 2023, the highest on record. The number plummeted in January. What executive action did we take between December and January?
My understanding is this works in cooperation with Mexico and other transit countries.
The third leg of the stool is, in fact, our work with other countries in the region, countries of transit, and working with them to ensure that they apply their laws of humanitarian relief as well as their laws of border enforcement.
And the December numbers in 2023 were so high because the Mexican enforcement agency ANAM ran out of funds and therefore there was no interdiction efforts on the Mexican side. And President Biden engaged with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. President Biden dispatched Secretary Antony Blinken and me to Mexico. President López Obrador obtained new funding for ANAM. And the conductors of the trains were accompanied by a member of the military that prevented bribes from being paid, migrants from boarding trains and arriving quite fast at our southern border. There were mirror patrols that were, once again, equipped to interdict individuals along the migratory path.
And so the Mexicans were able to ramp up their enforcement, and the numbers plummeted in January. And so I adhere to the position that a policy action in isolation would not necessarily work, though be of material impact.
And remember the risk calculus. The risk calculus is not in a vacuum — “Should I, or shouldn’t I?” The migrants also say, “Should I, or shouldn’t I place my life and my life savings in the hands of smugglers? Or” — and the disjunctive is important here — “am I willing to wait and seek access to the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan parole program? Am I willing to wait and take my chance at a safe mobility office?”
And so it’s not “Do I, or don’t I?” but it’s “Do I, or don’t I, and if I don’t, do I consider one of the alternatives that have been made available to me?” — that perhaps previously were less attractive but now have become more attractive because of the executive action that has been taken.
In 2019, border crossings go way up. When I asked people about that, they basically told me that the cruelties of the family separation program had come to light, that they sort of eased off because of that. The smugglers took that as an opportunity. But then the Trump administration turned around and threatened a bunch of countries south of the border — primarily Mexico but not only — with very significant tariffs if they didn’t crack down on flow, which is what brought down the numbers again.
In 2023, my understanding is you guys did not go to our partners with tariffs and try to do it punitively. But when border crossings got very high, one of the first moves was to try to rebuild an integrated mechanism here. What keeps our partners in partnership with us? What keeps them keeping their own enforcement regimes up? What do they want? What are the diplomatic dimensions of this?
They are varied, but let me cite two principles. One, of course, is fundamental, which is the measures that we take must adhere to our values. I would respectfully and vigorously submit that that distinguishes us from many of the measures that were taken in the prior administration that did not adhere to our values.
And the most notable example is one that you have referenced, the family separation policy, the “zero tolerance” policy that actually called for the separation of children from their parents for the express purpose of deterring other parents from migrating with their children to the United States. A horrific, indefensible policy.
With respect to the other countries, there’s a reality here, which is that irregular migration — while the United States might be the destination of choice because, in this administration, our economy has rebounded and is prospering far more rapidly and to a far greater degree than that of any other country in the region. We are the ultimate choice of destination. But the reality is that we’re not the only one. And the countries of transit realize and understand that they, too, are places of destination — not, perhaps, the top choice but a choice. And so irregular migration strains Mexico as well, because of people settling in Mexico. It strains Costa Rica, Panama as well. Colombia has regularized more than two million Venezuelans. And so it is a regional challenge that everyone understands requires a regional solution.
You mentioned the cruelty of many of Trump’s measures, though you didn’t necessarily identify the name. And I agree with that. But I do want to get your response to the thing I hear often from people who are, I would say, more sensibly on the right of this issue. What they say when they look at the data of migrant flows is that when Trump was in office, he made very clear that America was unfriendly to migration in general and illegal migration, in particular. So fewer people came, for the most part. And when things spiked, he acted very quickly to lean on our partners and twist their arms to bring that spike back down.
And then Democrats won in 2020. Trump’s actions had pushed the party to be a much more pro-immigrant party than it had been. The sort of rhetoric you would’ve heard from Bill Clinton was not how Democrats sounded in 2020 about this. The belief was that the Biden administration was a much more compassionate administration, was rolling back some of what Trump did, and the migration number soared, and that itself was a kind of policy failure. That it was not, in a weird way, more compassionate to be more compassionate, because it created this chaotic situation that has pushed the politics of immigration in this country quite far to the right — where what we are talking about now is not comprehensive immigration reform anymore. It’s how to kind of tighten the asylum system and better lock down the border. How do you respond to that?
It’s difficult to not be more compassionate than the prior administration. A principle of this administration’s governance is that we will adhere to our values, and that is a fundamental principle. I don’t believe that rhetoric was the draw to people. We were in a period of recovery from Covid. I spoke of the forces that led people to come to the United States. The reality is, if there’s a magnet, if you will, to use that term — it’s not a term I like very much, but just for the sake of conversation — the greatest magnet is the broken system that we have.
And this administration has taken actions to remedy that. The challenge is that our remedies are not necessarily durable, because they are challenged in court, and the enduring solution rests in the hands of Congress. So we’re going to be more compassionate because we ascribe to and execute on our values and we will not allow ourselves to be unmoored from them, because to do so, I think, threatens much more of our country’s identity than how we handle irregular migration.
By late 2023, the flow at the border is a crisis. When I’m talking to members of the Biden administration, nobody’s saying it’s a Fox News invention. There is a real sense that the policy needs to be fixed.
Negotiations begin again in late 2023 in the Senate between Senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma; Senator Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona; and Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut. And the administration gets involved. I believe you were quite involved yourself, particularly as the year went on. What would it do if it passed today that you’ve not been able to do through executive action?
Well, not only, Ezra, would that bipartisan legislation have achieved the outcomes that we are now achieving through executive action, but it would’ve done much more. And one primary thing it would have done, which would have been transformative, is resource the immigration system that has been perennially underfunded. It would’ve resourced us to have 1,500 more enforcement agents. It would’ve allowed us to have to hire over 4,000 more asylum officers. It would’ve funded the immigration court system with more immigration judges. It would have had just a remarkable shift in addressing some of the gaping shortcomings in the workings of our country’s immigration system, at least in the context of asylum and border enforcement — transformative changes.
Something I have heard from people who’ve worked on that bill is that the timing was off. By the time it was locked, the 2024 election was in swing, and Trump — and he deserves, I think, tremendous blame on this — called congressional allies and killed the bill. At the same time, the administration did not have to wait all the way until the end of 2023. The problems at the border were evident well before then. Why didn’t you all do this sooner?
Let’s first talk about the negotiations. The fact of the matter was that the senators were not lone actors, acting untethered to their respective colleagues, but were rather and importantly representative voices. Those negotiations were difficult, and they were ultimately successful. And because those senators had achieved significant compromise, but a really transformative piece of legislation for the first time since 1996, we did not foresee that that bipartisan negotiation that involved a great deal of compromise that delivered a solution for the American people would actually be torpedoed because some forces did not want a solution but rather would like the problem to persist for political purposes.
Then let me step back and speak about the timeline. Because this administration was not passive until those negotiations began. Quite to the contrary. First, let’s take a look at what was the reality at the border. Please remember that until May of 2023, we were operating under the force of Title 42, the public health order created by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the fact that people were subject to expulsion under Title 42 — an issue that was quite contested, frankly, by different constituencies.
And during that time, we did promulgate the asylum officer rule, empowering asylum officers to adjudicate cases. We did promulgate the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule immediately upon the end of the Title 42 order. People expected pandemonium, and pandemonium did not result. And then we went to Congress, and we sought additional funding for the immigration system in a supplemental funding request. That did not succeed. Once again, Congress failed to act. This administration went to Congress again and sought supplemental funding. Congress failed to act. And we went shortly thereafter into the negotiations for bipartisan legislation in the United States Senate.
So we certainly were not passive. Not only did we promulgate regulations; we built the lawful pathways that I referenced earlier. We built operational capacity that never previously existed — the ability to remove or return people more rapidly in one year. We’ve removed or returned a greater number of people than in any year for — I don’t recall the precise number, but certainly stretching well into the prior administration. We’ve built operational capabilities on the enforcement side that were unprecedented.
I take your point. I’m not saying that you all were seized by inaction, but there’s a force to what you did in June. There are a lot of Democrats — I mean, I speak to some of them — governing in border states who say, you know, “My life would be easier if they had done this earlier. If it was in their power to tighten the border as they now have and the flow is as responsive to that as it appears to have been, we could have been here earlier, and immigration wouldn’t be such a tough issue for me right now.”
I don’t want to minimize the impact of the executive action the president took in June. It has had a material, a very significant impact. But we cannot view that in isolation. And please remember that the executive action is a subject of ongoing litigation. We actually have a hearing on that litigation coming up. So the durability is subject to challenge, and it’s also important to remember — and this goes back to what we’ve been discussing — that the phenomenon of migration is by no means static.
Had we not had as robust an alternative in lawful pathways as we do now, having built those safe mobility offices, seeing them now really deliver results for people from the countries of origin, from the countries of challenge, we’ve exceeded the number of refugee admissions for this region than ever before. Building the operational capacity.
I don’t know that the executive action would necessarily have been as materially impactful had we done it earlier than had we done it now. And to do the executive action at a time when Title 42 is in operation — it’s very difficult to take this action out of its temporal and operational context, place it in another point in time and assume the exact same results would occur. I just don’t think migration works that way.
How do you think about what the immigration system should do? What is the point of America’s immigration system as a whole? Or at least what should it be?
I think its goals are, actually, well defined. We just don’t achieve its goals because the system has not been fixed to meet the times in which we live and how we have developed as a country. The three goals are basically economic prosperity, family unification and humanitarian relief.
Let’s take a look at economic prosperity. There is bipartisan agreement that our economy benefits from migrant labor. Take the nonagricultural unskilled visa, the H-2B. Republican and Democratic governors, senators, House members implore me to deploy the maximum number of visas available. And they all decry the fact that that maximum number is woefully inadequate to meet their respective jurisdictions’ needs. And that’s because the numeric limits were set in 1996. We’re in 2024 now.
Canada needed 700,000 jobs to be filled by migrant labor because those jobs could not be filled by the domestic work force. And so Canada decided to invite as many as a million migrant laborers to Canada for the benefit of its economic prosperity.
We’re stuck in 1996. Talent from all over the world comes to be educated in the United States at some of our best colleges and universities. They develop skills that our companies need and desperately want. The individuals themselves, the students now skilled, want to stay, and our immigration system does not provide them with an avenue to do so. And we lose them to other countries that end up competing with us. What a broken system, and it’s broken in terms of all three goals that underlie it.
What would it mean to update the system to achieve those three goals?
It would be a very significant overhaul. There are, of course, voices in our country that don’t agree with those three goals. There are voices that don’t believe in immigration to the United States, that want to change the very identity of this country. I think that would render our country far, far weaker and far less valued in the world. But it requires an overhaul.
In terms of my federal government service of more than 20 years, I grew up in the Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor. And the criminal codes had three goals: punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation. And certainly not all of those goals are always achieved. But one took a look at the criminal code, and it drove to those goals in a rather consistent way, if you will.
When I was introduced to the Immigration and Nationality Act as the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the statutes governing our immigration system — I saw patches and Band-Aids and bridges, sometimes broken. One can see a provision promulgated during one administration in tension with another statutory provision codified in a different administration with a different outlook. And those two are in tension, if not in conflict sometimes. It is a reality that an individual can be simultaneously eligible for deportation — we use the word “removal” now — and naturalization. And when I came to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the outcome that that individual encountered was dependent upon which office was adjudicating the case. That is not functional.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
The post The Real ‘Border Czar’ Defends the Biden-Harris Record appeared first on New York Times.