Border Patrol officers record migrant crossings in Jacumba Hot Springs, Calif., in April. (Li Qiang/The Washington Post)
The lead architect of President Joe Biden’s border strategy is not Vice President Kamala Harris, despite persistent Republican claims to the contrary. That role belongs to a bookish, little-known policy adviser named Blas Nuñez-Neto.
A data-driven technocrat, Nuñez-Neto has helped engineer Biden’s pivot toward tougher border enforcement and sweeping restrictions on asylum — moves that contributed to a nearly 80 percent drop in illegal crossings since December.
The transformation is shoring up one of Democrats’ biggest vulnerabilities ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election and potentially defusing a top-polling issue for Republican nominee Donald Trump. After three years of record crossings, the U.S.-Mexico border is quieter and more controlled today than at any point since late 2020, before Trump left office.
Nuñez-Neto pulled that off by steering the administration back to a border policy framework Democrats used to embrace more easily, according to current and former administration officials. The formula: Be generous and welcoming to immigrants seeking to come lawfully, but stingy and firm with those who don’t.
The White House declined to make Nuñez-Neto available for an interview. Biden officials said the administration’s border policy moves have been shaped by senior White House officials and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom Nuñez-Neto worked for before being promoted to the White House in June.
In a statement, White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said Biden “believes it is a false choice to say we have to walk away from being an America that embraces immigration in order to secure our border.”
“We must enforce our laws at the border and deliver consequences to those who do not have a legal basis to remain in the United States, and we must expand lawful pathways,” Fernández Hernández said.
Nuñez-Neto’s policy approach embodies the political calculus that while most Americans remain favorably disposed toward immigrants, few things erode the welcoming spirit faster than an out-of-control border. The growing U.S. economy needs workers, too, and immigrants help offset declining U.S. birth rates. But how they arrive matters.
Relying heavily on the president’s executive powers to grant entry using an authority known as parole, the Biden administration has been allowing nearly 75,000 migrants to enter each month through legal channels.
Republican critics denounce those pathways as a “shell game,” arguing the administration is facilitating mass migration through doors that should not be opened in the first place. But the expansion — paired with the most severe restrictions on asylum eligibility at the border from a Democratic administration in decades — has corralled the disorder.
Trump has largely ignored the change, displaying at his rallies a chart that shows record illegal crossings during Biden’s first three years and cuts out data showing the 2024 decline. He continues to label Harris, his Democratic opponent in the upcoming election, as the “border czar,” though she never held such a role. Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s plan to reduce Central American emigration by promoting investment and job creation, not to deal with immigration enforcement at the southern border.
That task - arguably one of the least-desirable in a Democratic administration - would become Nuñez-Neto’s.
A change in direction
The Argentine-born Nuñez-Neto was working on border security issues at the Rand Corporation in early 2021 when DHS policy adviser David Shahoulian — one of the few voices in the administration urging tougher measures at the border — recommended him for a job. He became chief operating officer for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Trump’s rhetoric and harsh policies in the White House had galvanized immigration advocacy groups and many Democrats against enforcement and the very idea of deterrence as an element of border security. Biden loosened restrictions, fueling a perception that the border was more open even as officials — including Harris — told would-be migrants “do not come.”
Shahoulian soon left the administration in frustration. In late 2021, Nuñez-Neto took over his role shaping border policy at DHS.
More than a year later, as the administration ended the pandemic-era Title 42 border restrictions, Biden officials increasingly sought help from Mexico, Panama and other nations in the region to help contain migration and cooperate with U.S. policies. Nuñez-Neto took on a second role as DHS’s top international envoy. He became a major diplomatic asset: a bilingual U.S. official capable of explaining policy to Spanish-language media and speaking directly to Latin American officials.
Nuñez-Neto developed an especially close partnership with Roberto Velasco, the top official at Mexico’s Foreign Ministry for North American affairs, according to current and former senior officials from both nations. Mexican authorities this year have arrested record numbers of migrants traveling through the country toward the U.S. border, a crackdown that Biden officials credit with sharply curtailing illegal crossings.
Angela Kelley, a senior adviser at DHS until June 2022, said the Biden administration has worked to craft a careful balance of incentives and penalties — carrots and sticks. She had been a longtime advocate for asylum seekers, and worked to resist Trump’s policies. Nuñez-Neto was laser-focused on border crossings, checking enforcement data daily.
“He’s more of a sticks guy, given his background,” said Kelley, now chief policy adviser at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Nuñez-Neto was promoted to the White House as the president announced strict new emergency measures that have upended decades of asylum law, closing the border when crossings are high and essentially barring access to U.S. courts for migrants who enter the country illegally.
The restrictions were made possible by a breakthrough agreement Nuñez-Neto helped negotiate with Velasco and other senior Mexican officials. It allows the United States to return large numbers of non-Mexican migrants back across the border — a crucial tool for agencies that have struggled to send deportees to Venezuela and other nations whose relations with Washington are strained.
As the deterrence policies took shape, the number of migrants released into the United States with a pending asylum claim — the procedure decried as “catch and release” — plummeted. It was Nuñez-Neto, not someone from Harris’s team, who fielded questions about the measures from reporters and on Capitol Hill.
“Those of us who follow the inside baseball of immigration know he’s the person that has become the de facto border czar,” said one policy adviser close to the administration who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe informal conversations with top officials.
Nuñez-Neto has done so with a quiet, disciplined manner that is the stylistic opposite of swaggering Trump-era border officials. Some immigration advocates and activists have come to view him with scorn, as a border-cop-in-sheep’s-clothing who speaks of migrants sympathetically while orchestrating the kind of crackdown immigration hard-liners have only dreamed of.
The sharp drop in illegal crossings has allowed the Harris campaign to go on offense. She blames Trump for sinking a bipartisan Senate bill last winter that would have provided billions in new funding for more border agents, detention capacity, deportation flights and other enforcement tools. She has called for Congress to pass the bill, and says she would sign it into law if she’s elected.
But several of its toughest provisions — in particular the emergency asylum restrictions — are already in place.
A young immigrant in Washington
Nuñez-Neto was 11 and living in an apartment in the nation’s capital when he met Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, after winning an essay contest that asked sixth-graders how to make Washington a “special city for special people.”
“Nobody is perfect,” wrote Nuñez-Neto, who had arrived in the country 2½ years earlier, according to a Washington Post article about the event in 1986. “But everyone is special. I could be more special by encouraging people and never saying bad words.”
After graduate school Nuñez-Neto worked at the Congressional Research Service and then as an aide to Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), specializing in border security. He was hired as an adviser to the CBP commissioner in 2015, when record numbers of Central American families and unaccompanied minors had started streaming across the border in Texas, catching the Obama administration off-guard.
The U.S. enforcement system had been primarily designed to contain mass migration by adult laborers, not families and children requesting humanitarian protection. But their right to do so is broadly protected under U.S. asylum law. Gil Kerlikowske, the CBP commissioner during Obama’s second term, said Nuñez-Neto became a trusted aide as the administration grappled with the problem.
“We traveled all over the world together,” Kerlikowske said in an interview. “He was brilliant. His experience and knowledge are astronomical.”
At one point during a trip to Poland, where U.S. officials were speaking with European border police about soaring numbers of asylum seekers, Nuñez-Neto urged Kerlikowske’s team to visit Treblinka, the site of a Nazi death camp. Kerlikowske said it was a sign to him of how seriously Nuñez-Neto took U.S. responsibilities to ensure migrants seeking U.S. refuge aren’t deported to face persecution or death.
Rewriting the rules
At DHS and then the White House, Nuñez-Neto has spent much of his time trying to subdue the forces that were set in motion during Biden’s first months in office.
The low point came in fall 2021, when thousands of mostly Haitian migrants crossed the border near Del Rio, Tex., and set up a squalid camp on the banks of the Rio Grande. Just weeks after Biden’s chaotic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the administration was suddenly facing a humanitarian crisis on U.S. soil.
Many of the migrants had been living for years in Brazil and Chile before seizing the opportunity to make the dangerous journey north.
“It was a huge wake-up call for all the countries along the route,” said former Biden immigration adviser Katie Tobin, who left the White House in February. “That was when we started negotiating a hemisphere-wide approach.”
Tobin led the development of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, signed in 2022 by the United States and 21 other countries. It became the framework for a more collaborative model that treats migration as something to manage rather than simply repress.
When Ukrainians started surging over the border after Russia’s invasion, Nuñez-Neto, Tobin and other Biden officials negotiated a deal with Mexico that allowed them to apply to enter the United States legally. When Venezuelan migration jumped, they developed a similar accord. Mexico made clear it would cooperate on tighter enforcement but wanted the United States to expand legal channels.
The United States now offers nearly 1,500 appointments a day along the southern border to asylum seekers who register with the CBP One mobile app. Up to 30,000 citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can apply each month to enter the United States legally with a financial sponsor.
Nuñez-Neto and other Biden officials are restrained when describing the decline in illegal crossings. They have seen the numbers can spike quickly in response to changes in U.S. enforcement.
And they recognize the strategy they’ve crafted rests on a wobbly foundation of fragile international accords and disputed executive actions that are facing challenges in federal court.
“We are making progress,” said Fernández Hernández. “But long-term, the only lasting solution is for Congressional Republicans to stop playing politics and pass the bipartisan border deal.”
