In August, a federal judge in Texas ordered the government to reinstate the Trump-era immigration policy that Andrea Flores was working to dismantle. Her new task would be the mirror image of the job she started: reimplementing a policy she despised.
, was targeting Latinos. The Walmart that he chose to terrorize was known, in this stretch of the borderlands, as “the Mexican Walmart.” The strip mall where it was situated attracted shoppers from Mexico and nearby cities, including Las Cruces. Flores’s parents had planned to eat lunch across the street that very afternoon. “That’s the mall we’ve been going to my whole life,” she told me. “There was a victim that day named Maria Flores, which is my mom’s name.
Around this time, Flores was contributing to early discussions among the Biden transition team. Cecilia Muñoz, who was tapped to lead part of the process, had brought her on to discuss immigration policy., who would become Biden’s national-security adviser, saw the issue as a top priority. It was “an extremely receptive audience,” Flores told me. “They were following family separation. They had a high awareness of M.P.P.
During the Trump years, a network of faith leaders, shelters, and legal-service providers had “assumed a quasi-governmental function” at the border, Flores said. These were groups like the Florence Project, Jewish Family Services, Annunciation House, and Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. Some officials at D.H.S. were wary of working with advocacy groups, but Flores wanted to partner with them. “They knew the people who were waiting in M.P.P. by name,” she said.
In late February, the working group began closing a refugee camp in Matamoros—across the border from Brownsville—which had become a symbol of the immiserated conditions that M.P.P. had forced migrants into. Winter storms had recently devastated Texas. Officials at the White House worked with local nonprofits and the mayor’s office in Brownsville to arrange transportation to shelters, and coördinated with representatives from the Mexican government to address security concerns.
Inside the White House, Flores was earning a mixed reputation, in spite of all that she was accomplishing. She had clashed with her first boss over the timing and other technical aspects of the M.P.P. wind-down. Some of her superiors cautioned her about “personnel problems” that kept interfering with the high quality of her work: she was told that she was “too intense” or “too close to the issues,” and that she had a habit of turning disagreements into ad-hominem conflicts.
Biden’s incoming agenda was a high-wire act: prevent and discourage migrants from crossing the border in between ports of entry, while slowly rebuilding the government’s capacity for handling asylum seekers. Flores saw the M.P.P. wind-down as a model for an orderly process at the ports. But, through the spring and summer, the White House wavered. “Senior leadership was saying that we were letting in too many people,” Flores told me.
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