WASHINGTON.— For much of Joe Biden’s presidency, Ken Salazar was inside the room. As U.S. ambassador to Mexico, the former Cabinet secretary watched the border crisis unfold from one of the most consequential diplomatic posts in the Western Hemisphere. He saw migration become an increasingly serious challenge for the administration and, eventually, one of Donald Trump’s most powerful political weapons.
Now, outside government, Salazar’s assessment of his former boss is unusually sharp: the Biden administration “woke up too late.”
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Salazar argues that the White House failed to grasp the urgency of the border crisis from the beginning, neglected Mexico while focusing much of its foreign policy attention on Europe and Asia, and struggled to explain its strategy to the American public.
By the time Biden began taking stronger action, Salazar believes much of the political damage had already been done.
“From day one, there should have been a great sense of urgency to deal with the crisis of a collapsed border and the migration crisis that we are witnessing,” Salazar said.
His criticism is detailed in his new book, Borderlands, in which he recounts his years in the Biden administration while making a broader argument about the way Washington approaches Mexico and the Americas.
Salazar believes American foreign policy has long been dominated by what he describes as an “east-west paradigm”: looking toward Europe and Asia while paying insufficient attention to Mexico, Latin America and the Western Hemisphere.
The Biden administration, he argues, fell into the same pattern.
According to Salazar, the White House lacked both a comprehensive strategy for dealing with migration and the border and a coherent communications operation capable of explaining what the administration was doing.
That vacuum had consequences.
Republicans filled it.
“I think that’s what caught the administration in that feeling of having woken up too late, right when they were finally taking the right steps to secure the border,” he said.
Salazar also recounts an extraordinary moment when he came close to resigning as ambassador.
During a presidential visit to Mexico, following meetings at the National Palace in Mexico City, Salazar intended to present Biden with a proposal he considered critical. But he learned that neither he nor former Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd would participate in an important meeting scheduled for the following day.
The exclusion frustrated him enough that he considered leaving his post.
Eventually, Salazar secured a private conversation with Biden and delivered his warning directly.
“We need someone in the White House overseeing the border, migration, Mexico and the Americas. Right now, no one is in charge. We need a ‘czar’ for the border and migration,” Salazar recalled telling the president.
His idea was to designate a senior official with enough authority to coordinate federal agencies, direct policy from Washington and communicate a unified message on border and migration issues.
Salazar pointed to Jeffrey Zients, who had coordinated the federal government’s COVID-19 response, as an example of the kind of centralized leadership he believed the border crisis required.
But time continued to pass.
When Biden issued executive action in June 2024 that helped sharply reduce border crossings, Salazar argues that the administration committed another political mistake: it failed to effectively communicate the results before Biden withdrew from the presidential race.
By then, public perceptions of the border had hardened.
Trump had found an issue capable of dominating the political conversation.
Salazar acknowledges part of Trump’s argument. The border, he says, was “broken.”
Where he parts ways with Trump is over how the United States should respond.
The former ambassador rejects an approach that demonizes migrants or deepens divisions inside the country. He argues that border enforcement and national security must coexist with respect for individual rights and the rule of law.
“That’s not the American way—where people have rights, where there is a sense of safety and where we understand the importance of our security inside our own country, as well as the importance of supporting law enforcement,” he said.
Salazar points to his tenure as Colorado attorney general, where he oversaw thousands of law enforcement officers, as evidence of his longstanding support for policing.
His criticism, however, does not stop with Biden.
Salazar argues that both Democratic and Republican administrations have repeatedly mishandled U.S. policy toward the Americas.
Republicans, he says, learned years ago how effectively immigration could be used as a political issue. Democrats understand its importance but too often concentrate on the U.S. border and domestic debates such as immigration reform while paying insufficient attention to Mexico and the migration routes farther south.
For Salazar, that is where a different strategy must begin.
His “Borderlands Platform” calls for a new partnership among the United States, Mexico and Canada built around deeper security cooperation, greater labor mobility and renewed investment in North American trade.
Migration, he argues, should not be treated simply as another partisan fight in Washington. It is also a national security and economic issue that affects the entire continent.
On trade, Salazar even finds common ground with Trump. He supports renewing the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the trade pact negotiated during Trump’s first administration to replace NAFTA.
After years representing Washington in Mexico City, Salazar’s broader message is that America cannot solve its border problems by concentrating exclusively on the physical line separating the United States and Mexico.
The forces driving migration begin much farther south.
His proposal is for Washington to look again at its closest neighbors and treat North America as a shared strategic space for economic prosperity and security.
And despite his disagreements with Trump, Salazar hopes the current administration will consider something resembling the Borderlands strategy he is proposing.
His experience inside the Biden administration left him with a warning for future presidents: when Washington waits until a border crisis becomes a political crisis, it may already be too late.
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