Transition 2025 Series: The Future of Immigration Policy and Border Security in the United States

Panelists discuss the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including increased deportations, the attempt to end birthright citizenship, and the suspension of refugee admissions, as well as the implications for U.S. national security and foreign policy.

This meeting is part of CFR’s Transition 2025 series, which examines the major foreign policy issues confronting the Trump administration.

The Silberstein Family Annual Lecture on Refugee and Migration Policy was established in 2019 through a generous gift from Alan M. Silberstein and the Silberstein family. The lecture provides CFR with an annual forum to explore emerging challenges in refugee and migration policy in the United States and around the world.

BRIDI: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us, and welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations Silberstein Family Annual Lecture on Refugee and Migration Policy. This meeting is titled “The Future of Immigration Policy and Border Security in the United States.”

My name is Alfred Bridi. I’m an immigration attorney with Scale LLP, and I’ll be presiding over today’s discussion.

This is an endowed annual lecture, and it was established in 2019 through the generous gift of Alan Silberstein and the Silberstein family. We’re delighted to be in the presence of Mr. Silberstein, so thank you so much.

I am very excited to present the panel. And I will just start by saying that this meeting is on the record and—yeah.

The panel today is amazing in the sense that it covers policy—the speakers, their expertise cover(s) policy, implementation, and analysis. They have experience across agencies and over decades along the border as well as in Washington.

So I’m going to start with Alfredo, introducing Alfredo Corchado, who’s executive editor correspondent at the Puente News Collaborative. He’s also the author of Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries, and the Fate of the Great Mexican-American Migration.

Next we have Andrea Flores, who’s vice president of immigration policy at FWD.us. She’s also the former director for border management at the National Security Council in 2021.

And Ron Vitiello, closest to me, is senior advisor for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He’s the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is the former chief of U.S. Border Patrol.

Thank you all for being with us today.

So, Ron, I’m going to start with you. And you’ve had a career spanning decades, agencies, administrations, and your perspective goes from the borderlands to the Beltway. I’d love it if you could place today’s moment in historical context for us and maybe describe how it’s similar or different to what—to how we—to how we got here.

VITIELLO: Great. And thanks for this opportunity. Thanks for inviting me. And thank you all for your attention.

I think what we’re seeing right now on the Southwest border—and it’s true a bit on the northern border as well—but the traffic is almost—it has muted in a very dramatic way. The data for last week, we’re at, like, 96 percent fewer apprehensions, and that’s CBP-wide. Between the ports it’s a little bit more than that. And so what that means is for all of last year we saw about 7,000 apprehensions—that’s people that were actually encountered by law enforcement at the border—per twenty-four-hour period. So over 7,000 people every single night tried to enter the United States in between the ports of entry or at the ports of entry in some illegal status. And last night, the encounters for CBP-wide were less than 300. So there’s been a dramatic change in the workload for the individuals that are on the frontline, both at CBP at the ports, Border Patrol between the ports, and ICE officers that are left to adjudicate the people that are in custody.

So, with a workload down like that, that allows more of a—of deployment of the boots on the ground, both at the ports—which are facilitating trade and travel—and then at the border itself. So that’s more agents on patrol. That’s more equipment in service to surveil and protect the border. And it’s just been a dramatic shift that really started, you know, on the 20^th of January with the changes in policy, with a few executive orders and an application of a plan and a strategy that discourages people from trying to enter. And those that do, there’s a high rate of prosecution now of people who enter the country illegally, and then those that are in custody are not in custody for very long. So they’re being returned quite rapidly versus other times in my career. So a big change.

A lot to do still. I mean, I think on the operational side, lower numbers, you know, usually equate to success, but there needs to be, you know, a sustainability package in place, a strategy that allows us to do what we’re doing via policy changes, via executive order. And then the resources that are required to sustain are still an unmet need as far as the physical operation goes.

BRIDI: Andrea, I’d love to ask, from a legal and policy perspective, can you talk about the basis and maybe the framework relied upon in this administration to achieve its agenda? And maybe how, while the ends may differ from the previous administration, how are the means different?

FLORES: Sure. So thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to talk about this issue and to kind of contextualize what we’re seeing. I think there’s two things.

So, first, the—President Trump, like President Biden and President Obama, is heavily reliant on his executive authority to either manage the border or to manage immigration within the country. And so what you’ve seen from across administrations is presidents having to rely on a series of almost, like, stopgap tools to manage a rapidly changing global migration, especially in the Western Hemisphere. So I tell people in the last ten years, when I was serving in the Obama administration until I entered the Biden administration, displacement in the Western Hemisphere increased by 30 percent. And that was really unprecedented. You didn’t see that type of displacement in our region. And so what did that mean? It meant it tested an immigration system that had not been really updated in terms of order since 1990. The legal pathways have not been created since 1990. And so every president is dealing with an immigration system that does not really give them the tools to successfully create a sustainable border-management strategy.

And so, really, what you’re seeing, though, with President Trump is two really big legal shifts. So, one, in his initial executive orders he is citing the Constitution and his foreign policy authority, claiming that there is an invasion in the last four years and that that invasion is equivalent to what would be an incursion by a foreign government or a foreign state. And that is opening up, then, new powers, whether to suspend the asylum system, but also to go in and evaluate legal immigration, green-card holders. And so that’s just a really different legal phase. And I think you’ll see a lot of court—kind of interesting court cases that will answer just how much does the Constitution and the president’s foreign policy power allow him to do, because there is a very complicated, regulated immigration sort of law in place. And so—but you also saw under President Biden him also sort of using emergency powers to ultimately suspend immigration law. So there is a continuation in that piece as well.

So I think a big question is, does the president’s foreign policy power supersede immigration law as we know it, or does it not? And at the end of the day, how does Congress actually deliver any executive far better modern immigration tools that will allow our country to actually modernize the way people enter the country, how they stay, and how they stabilize?

BRIDI: And, Alfredo, I’m curious from—specifically from the border perspective, how has—how have things changed since January 20? And can you tell us a little bit about the last couple months, but also maybe the period preceding Inauguration Day and maybe since the election?

CORCHADO: Sure. And thank you, CFR. I am proudly representing the other Ellis Island, which is on the southern border, El Paso.

I would say instead of maybe talking of since January 20, the numbers really started going down dramatically, I would say, last summer. As Andrea was saying, President Biden took some actions, and then the Mexican government was very, very active in helping the U.S. government stop the flow.

But since January 20, I mean, we’ve seen the numbers. I think in December, at least on the El Paso-Juarez western Texas area, we were looking at about 300 people a day encounters. These days, I checked the numbers Monday, and the numbers are below fifty a day. So that immediacy, I mean, it’s taking effect. You don’t hear the helicopters flying as much as you did. You don’t see the vans, you know, running up and down. What you are seeing—what we are seeing, in El Paso we have a huge mountain where we have Cristo Rey, which oversees El Paso—I mean, Texas, Chihuahua, New Mexico. And you’ve seen Border Patrol agents with soldiers just riding around that whole area. So a lot more military activity.

And the other thing you’ve seen, which I never thought I would see this in my—I’ve been a journalist for more than thirty-five years, but I never thought I would see this—is paquetes de retorno, which are—(inaudible)—are now offering packages where people can go back home from a place like Ciudad Juarez. You want to go home or you want to go back to Honduras? Or maybe you don’t want to go back to Honduras because it’s too dangerous. You don’t want to go to Guatemala. But maybe you want to go to Costa Rica. And so they’re offering these packages where you can just go back home. Not all of them are taking it. I mean, many—we are seeing many migrants in limbo, staying in Mexico, not just along the border. I think the goal of the Mexican government is to keep them away from the border, taking them into other parts of Mexico, central Mexico, especially southern Mexico, because of so many job opportunities in the south—service-oriented, tourism-oriented. That’s kind of what we’re seeing.

When I was talking to a CBP person the other day, and said—I said, well, it sounds like you now have operational control, which in all my years as a journalist I’ve never understood what operational control means. But he said it is so bad that I’m afraid that Elon Musk may be eyeing our jobs because we’re not really doing much, I mean, with so many military, with so many agents on the border. But I said, look, you’re the star of the theater, because I think the border has been turned into a theater, into a prop; they’re not going to get rid of you, you know?

BRIDI: So just on the border again, I’m curious about how detention—the talk of detention has changed in this new administration. So, Ron, I’d love it if you could speak a little bit about the shift in detention, and maybe the other panelists also discuss kind of what they’re seeing either on the ground or in D.C. on detention.

VITIELLO: Yeah. Yeah, let me just go back on the pipeline. It is true that people are going a different direction, right? In the—in the Darien Gap, which is a very dangerous part of Panama where people will walk through the jungle on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border, and we’re seeing the traffic going the other direction. It’s a much safer place now because people aren’t risking that walk or that dangerous journey through there.

The CBP One app, before it was changed and reconfigured for CBP Home, which is what it’s called today, we’ve seen thousands of people who were let into the country on parole under the CBP One app who have fled. There’s thousands of people who elected to not be here for the implementation of the current policy. And then even in CBP Home its feature now is for people to raise their hand and say: Look, I don’t want a knock at my door. I know I’m here illegally. I know my status is somewhat in question, and I’m ready to go home. And they can ask for assistance, which will be provided. That’s brand new. That started, I think, last week.

You mentioned detention. One of the executive orders that the president issued to us was the end—colloquially is called the end of catch and release. And so where people would overwhelm the system and have to be let out of detention or let out of proceedings or let out of custody at the border, that process has ended. If someone in the field for humanitarian reasons needs to release somebody to go to the hospital or to care for a loved one, those—that has to be approved in the halls of Washington. And so no mass releases, and that changes traffic patterns.

And so detention is the alternative. And so what we have worked on in the last several weeks in CBP is to keep people out of the short-term holding facilities and move them into longer-term detention or remove them. And then ICE is doing the same thing. They are making arrests—at-large arrests of criminals all over the country, and they are typically underfunded in the area of having detention space. This year is no different. They’ve been funded for about 35,000 beds by the Congress, but right now they’re closer to 48,000 people in custody. And so they’re trying to economize the use of that resource and then comply with the president’s order not to release people who are in the country illegally.

BRIDI: You spoke about folks who are either in between or in the middle with some sort of uncertain status, and that’s kind of—I want to tease that a little bit. So we often talk about immigration as a binary, with people either in status or out of status, or with a visa or without a visa. There are a lot of people on either temporary visas, on parole with pending applications. Andrea, I’d love it if you could speak to, you know, what that looks like—what that experience looks like and this kind of expansion of the border, how that affects them.

FLORES: So, yeah. So I actually grew up in a border community, and I think what’s interesting about this moment in immigration politics is our entire national understanding of immigration is subsumed by the border, right? So the question of detention, detention is one piece of a tool to manage migration. But let’s talk about what does the actual, let’s say, undocumented population look like?

So for the last—you know, my entire lifetime, right, legalization of the undocumented has been a bipartisan objective. But I think what you’ve seen is our global migration challenges have changed, and administration after administration has faced that they don’t have the right tools. And you know, our system isn’t designed for the economy that we have. Then the border became the front door of the entire immigration system, right? So you saw people who were—you know, had humanitarian protection claims waiting in the same line as someone who had a job that they were going to fill because our economy needed it, or in the same line as someone who was just trying to reunite with a family member. That is no way for a major nation like the United States to manage an immigration system. I don’t think any family should have to cross multiple countries in order to seek some form of legal status.

So one of, I think, the smartest innovations in the last four years, one of the newest things in immigration policy, was President Biden created a series of legal pathways; also using existing authority, used his parole authority. And what he did was he actually looked at four of the highest-sending countries—so Venezuelans, Cubans, Haiti, Nicaragua. Those countries were a huge, like, proportion of the people at the border. And so what he did was he said, all right, what if we create a—kind of modeling after other countries, use sponsorship. Allow an American citizen to sponsor someone, so instead of them having to traverse multiple countries, use a smuggling network, they can come in through a legal process, be vetted, fly into an airport. They’re not processed at the border. It’s orderly. They get work authorization and they fill jobs. We’ve seen them disperse across the country into rural areas, too, who are desperate for more immigration. And so that is the future, but that isn’t something you hear a lot about because it’s not confined to the border.

And so what has happened, though, to all of those people who used that legal option, right now their status is going to be revoked. And so the government authorized them to come, authorized them to work. And so we have about—somewhere in the range of hundreds and thousands of employers who have hired work-authorized people who are now going to have to fire those employees. That whiplash in our immigration policy and our politics is really going to hurt our economy and it’s really going to hurt people.

When you ask the American public what kind of immigration policy do you support, they support legal processes. They want it to be orderly. They want it to make sense. They want it to be fair. And right now, there’s—every administration—and I started at the beginning of the Biden administration. We also did the quick undoing and the rapid change and the whiplash, and that impacts communities. And I think at the end of the day the future of this issue is which party is going to go to Congress and successfully negotiate a truly modern immigration system.

BRIDI: And that truly modern system, so what will it look like to you? So it’ll look—you know—

FLORES: Yeah.

BRIDI: What will it cover and how comprehensive will it—

FLORES: Well, at FWD.us we’re a bipartisan advocacy organization. We work with both parties. We recently released a framework that I authored that actually takes a lot of—looks at the last ten years of migration management and says: What has worked? What has changed people’s incentives to migrate in an unauthorized manner? What has created more order? And it creates a blueprint around six pillars of policy interventions that we and experts believe—we spent six months just going to every migration expert in the field, law enforcement, people in the region, people in the advocacy community, and we asked them, what’s worked for your clients, for people migrating? And so we put forward a blueprint, and we hope that when Congress turns to—whether they do a border deal, whether they look at foreign aid, that there is a set of tools that are evidence-based. You haven’t seen that kind of, I think, blueprint in a long time because we’ve all been working against the last big push, which was the 2013 bipartisan immigration bill. That bill is not applicable to the world we really live in today. And so there does need to be a massive update in rethinking what does immigration reform in 2025 look like.

BRIDI: Ron, from a—you know, right now we’re in a moment—we’ve heard the term “whiplash” a few times, rapid speed. This is kind of how it feels, every day is a bit of a—of a tidal wave. Can this momentum be sustained? And from an enforcement perspective, what does—you know, what does the next few months or years look like?

VITIELLO: Well, Alfredo mentioned the term “operational control.” And it has, I think, been—until Congress wrote it down, it had been kind of a term of art. We know we wanted to achieve operational control. We wanted to allow people to come that were legal, allow things to come in that were legal, and stop all the bad things and bad people.

I would say that that is a useful term. Congress said that it’s the prevention of all illegal entry across the Southwest border. They asked for that. We promoted it while I was still in government, but it’s never been resourced. And so if we want to achieve that as a country, then there’s a number of steps that have to be taken with regard to the technology laydown, with regard to infrastructure, and the number of staff that are responsible for allowing the good things to come in and screening them appropriately, and then preventing entries between the ports of entry. And so what does that look like? That looks like a lot—a huge investment.

And to your point, I think to end the whiplash, to keep things from spiraling out of control, Congress needs to act. They need to fortify what can be done by policy and executive order with a legal framework that establishes benchmarks, that says operational control is going to be a standard that we can achieve with the proper investment.

And you have to end the incentives. I took your point that the 2013 bill was—allowed in, just like the last administration said, hey, this bill that was bipartisan and we’re going to end this crisis at the border, we’re going to give the president more power, it didn’t work because over the years we’ve lost the faith of the American people that we really want to solve this problem. On both sides of the aisle I think there’s been people that said, well, hey, look, we’re going to do it this way or we’re going to do it that way, and it requires them to think together and pull something together that they could both withstand. But the American people’s trust is based on the confidence whether we can control the border or not. If you have thousands of people coming across the border every single night, the American people are not going to be generous with a legal immigration system or a pathway to work in the U.S. even if our economy demands or needs it. You’ve got to have a substantial presence and control at the border before we can be more generous.

We all share an immigration story in our—in our—many Americans share an immigration story in their background. My mom wasn’t born here; she came as a displaced person during World War II. And so those of us that are involved in this and lived at the border, we understand why people come. But I also understand that the broader public, which drives who’s in the House and in the Senate and who represents us in that government, that they don’t really trust what we’ve done, or what has been done, or what people say about the border. It needs to be proven. It needs to be legislated in a way that restores that confidence.

BRIDI: Alfredo, I wanted to ask you about the perspective from both Mexico and perhaps the wider region. You were talking about some of the internal policies with a lot more people either stuck at the border or not being able to go up. Can you tell us a little bit about how they’re reacting to this new administration and how other countries as well are handling this?

CORCHADO: I think it’s a lot of a—of a wait-and-see attitude. I mean, I don’t see a lot—even though there’s these paquetes, these packages to return, I don’t see, like, many, many people taking that. I think there’s a lot of let’s wait and see, because one thing they’re waiting is will there be a recession in the United States. And if there’s a recession, then that’s operational control because you’re not going to see a lot of people trying to cross into the U.S.

I mean, the big thing here is really the economic engine. I have yet to really interview—maybe one person who says I’m coming here to just try it out because it might be fun. They’re coming here because in their family network or network of friends someone says there’s a job—there’s a job in Nashville, there’s a job in North Carolina, New York City. So they’re coming for jobs. The effort of the Mexican government to try to create jobs for them, they’re asking the—President Claudia Sheinbaum is asking the private sector and the public sector to start creating jobs.

But I think they’re also waiting to see how these deportations really materialize. Even though the numbers are—have plummeted, deportations to Mexico, deportations to other country have not really changed much with the Biden administration. So there’s still a sense of this thing may go one—I mean, last week I was interviewing some people in Ciudad Juarez I was interested in because they had gone as far down south as Coahuila, a couple of states down from Chihuahua. They went there looking for jobs, and then their relatives in the U.S. said you might want to come back to the border because things maybe pick up as the harvest season starts, tourism season starts with the service industry. So they’re just—I mean, I hadn’t seen migrants on the streets of downtown Ciudad Juarez since January 20. I mean, many of them just left. But I was surprised that there was a—there was a little group. I’m not saying they’re—you know, they’re going to cross, but I think there is a sense of let’s wait and see for the next few months, A, is there a recession; B, will there be enough pressure from U.S. business leaders, industries, to bring us to the United States.

I mean, there’s a real—I always look at U.S.-Mexico history. The 1920s/30s, it was a tough time; great repatriation that led to a guestworker program. And World War II, tough time, big bracero program. I know that story well because my own father came here as a bracero when—with the Korean War. And because of my father, I am—today I’m at CFR speaking to you as a legal U.S. citizen, just one—a U.S. citizen. But we all came as green-card holders because my father—because his employer could not let go of him. When my father said, you know what, I think I’m going to go back to Mexico, raise my kids, build, open a store, the employer said, well, why don’t you just bring the whole family? Because we need—we need people like you. So I’m curious, as I—as we look forward, where the—we’re in that same cycle again, that something’s going to happen.

BRIDI: I really like that optimistic, positive tone looking backwards.

I want to—I want to look ahead in the—you know, again, for reform, we’ve talked about how it should look like. How do we feel it will look like if it does happen? Where does the hope lie? And where should we invest our efforts? Maybe Andrea, Ron?

FLORES: Yeah. Well, let’s see—let’s see if you agree. I think we actually have a lot of areas of agreement.

So I think the public is very clear about what they support and don’t support, right? They support orderly legal migration. And whether it’s at the border or whether it is in communities, they really rejected what they saw in the last four years. And I worked in the Biden administration, and it was one of the most sort of chaotic, you know, just series of events that happened, whether that was the federal government saying New York City, Denver, Boston, we don’t have the tools to help you; or whether it was saying, you know, in Congress—I went to the Senate after I left the White House, and it was just interesting to hear administration officials say there’s no crisis, it is essentially under control. But the American people, you can’t tell them that they didn’t see what they saw, right?

And I think one of the mistakes of really the last four years was not narrating some of what was happening, right? There was a Venezuelan refugee crisis in our hemisphere. In the last day of President Trump’s final (sic) administration, he issued temporary status for Venezuelans. But what you didn’t hear from the president is what you heard in Europe when there was a Syrian refugee crisis—very hard, very political, difficult for many world leaders, but you at least knew what was happening. You knew that there was a mass displacement. And so right now I think most Americans really feel that maybe the United States took in more Venezleuans than others in the hemisphere when really Colombia and Peru took in far more. And so when you don’t even talk to the public about what is happening on immigration, then the misinformation really sort of takes over. So I think that’s one piece.

So the future does have to look like rebuilding trust with the American public. I do think the border is a huge piece of that, which is why one of the first sort of future projects we put out was about the border. If you don’t show that the border—because it is the most visible part of our immigration system—is managed, the public won’t trust you in what else you promise. But the public has been waiting—I think—I’m Mexican American. I think my family’s been here, I mean, since the 1800s. I know they have been. So I’m thinking the longest. And the reason I bring that up is because for decades there was a lot of talk about the Latino vote. Mexicans are the majority of the undocumented population, right? They have been for decades. And they have been told by president after president that there was going to be a push for a path to citizenship. And now we’re going on—you know, I—when I talk to people in my own community, they say only Reagan really delivered.

And so what you see is a huge undocumented population that is absolutely part of the fabric of our community. And I understand why mass deportations feels like the only solution when you haven’t even heard about all the benefits we can get as a country from legalization, right? You don’t know any more—we don’t use those arguments. President Obama, when I worked for him, always talked about the economic benefits of legalization, because you don’t just have to get the border right; you have to stabilize the undocumented community because the United States has the largest undocumented community in the entire world. That is absolutely, I think, outrageous for the way our economy works and for the dignity of those people.

So Americans actually support that. You ask them, do you support legalization for someone who’s been here over ten years? Yes. Do you support legalization for an undocumented immigrant who’s married to an American citizen and can’t adjust? Yes. Do you support DREAMers? Yes. Do you support people fleeing—very specific; when they hear what they’re fleeing, they’re far more generous. So that is how Washington has to start engaging on this if they hope to ever move legislation. So that is a lot of what I think many advocacy groups are trying to do, but there really is going to have to be a huge bipartisan shift in the way we treat this issue.

VITIELLO: I don’t disagree there has to be a framework that establishes operational control. We have to have faith in the government and what our politicians tell us about what happens on the border, both the actual physical operations—like how many people are coming and how many got away—that has to be in a very—that has to be established in a very transparent way.

That will lead to a dialogue about what to do with all the people that are here, and it’s—I think you have the same equation. You have to establish trust that these folks are going to be vetted. But I think the most important thing is, is that you can’t incentivize people from—another wave coming, right? So if you—if you establish and sustain a measure of control on the border, and you start to give pathways of whatever kind for people to work here, to people to participate in the economy, that also has to be—there has to be a trust established there that these people are, you know, vetted in a way that they’re not going to be—you know, that people aren’t going to be suspicious of them, and that we are going to be in a—in a safe situation.

And I would just say about the Venezuelan scenario, it’s something that I’ve never seen. It didn’t exist—you know, whether it was based on people fleeing or it was based on some kind of calculated operation by the Maduro regime, I don’t know the case of that. I think that there’s a strong case that they were affiliated with the government and that they’re now coming here—or, they came here in numbers. But they weren’t an issue in the United States before 2023. I mean, they just weren’t here in significant enough numbers to cause the kind of havoc that we’ve seen them do. So that is—in the whole—in the grand scheme of let’s control the border, let’s figure out what to do with all the other unmet needs, that’s an anomaly, I think, in that discussion.

FLORES: I will say, you know, any time you have a refugee crisis, though, the integration challenges that you’ve seen with the Venezuelan community—the fact that many of them did come forward, were vetted, did use a legal pathway, had an American citizen sponsor them—it actually—that’s a trust-building exercise, right? And I think that’s how I see that community.

And I’m very concerned—you know, we talked about the legal landscape. I don’t understand why wartime authority is being used to target one particular nationality. I think that’s very dangerous and it goes into darker periods of our history. The Alien Enemies Act was used to intern Japanese U.S. citizens, German U.S. citizens, Italian U.S. citizens. So I’m very concerned that the American people are hearing that something like that is needed. If there are people and they pose a public safety threat or a national security threat, our immigration laws are actually very well-equipped to then remove them from the country. So you don’t need to invoke—and I’m scared for that population. I know we’re both from the El Paso area and we’re both Mexican—(laughs)—and so I remember the outcome of years since 2015 of sort of Mexicans are rapists and criminals, and sort of what was the outcome of that demonization. And so I think this is a really important conversation to have because we don’t want people to be more unsafe, and the United States did extend its hand and did create a legal process for Venezuelans. And I think we have to remember that that also was vetted and that was also secure.

CORCHADO: And you also have the issue of a lone gunman from north Texas drive up to El Paso to target Mexicans to get rid of the U.S.—the Mexican invasion of the United States. So that’s something that’s very worrisome for border communities and I would just say for majority-minority communities throughout the country.

But on the Venezuela thing, I mean, the Venezuela experience, it really started off in Colombia and other South American countries—Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico—and then the United States. So, I mean, it went throughout the whole region before they arrived in the United States.

VITIELLO: Yeah, and I don’t disagree with that. I would just say that they were prolific enough to challenge, you know, retail drug sales in Colombia, right? Their organization, a mafia like any other, was powerful enough to control the drug trade in Colombia and was affiliated in a way with the Venezuelan government to run the prison system—you know, the national prison system in Venezuela. So this isn’t the same kind of gang or—and I don’t—I don’t equate it with other groups of people who came in large numbers, like the Italians from my dad’s side of the family, like the Irish before them. I don’t see those parallels. They are—the Tren de Aragua, that gang particularly had influence in the region and the country in a way that most other gangs didn’t.

BRIDI: I’m going to—I’m going to jump in quickly. We are going to open the floor to questions, both in the room and virtually. I would like for people to raise their hand, state their name and affiliation. Also, we will be taking questions virtually, so we’ll be going back and forth. I’ll start with someone in the room. OK, here. Just a reminder, this meeting is on the record.

Q: David Nachman, unaffiliated. Thank you for your comments.

Ron, just on the Venezuelan thing, I’ve been in Venezuelan prisons. I don’t know if you have. But it’s a different environment. And I don’t think the suggestion that Tren de Aragua is affiliated with the government in the running the prisons—in fact, Venezuelan prisons are run by the inmates. That’s just a general thing.

I would ask you, though, what do you understand the administration’s plans to be for mass migration out? And given two things—that our economy, by all accounts, has depended tremendously on undocumented labor for the past decade, or more; and, secondly, that the rate of criminal prosecutions in the immigrant population is actually lower than that in the non-immigrant population—do you have a view—do you really—you suggested earlier that legal immigration is good, that by implication illegal immigration presents dangers, presents risks. But specifically, as to the mass migration plans of the administration, are they, in your personal opinion, justified, by the—in light of the two considerations that I’ve mentioned—relative criminality rates and importance to the economy?

VITIELLO: Well, I think that—I don’t want anybody to leave here believing that I think that all people who come here illegally, other than committing that crime, are a danger to us. Because it is—as the reporter said, that this is an economic challenge for the regions that they come from, the countries that they come from, and in our own economy. But as far as, like, the mass migration plans, I think the short-term strategy is not to have another surge at the southwest border, like we’ve seen over the last several decades, right? Starting in 2012, I think the ones that were the most dramatic up until the last several years. So the plan is to not allow people to stay if they came under those conditions.

And the effort underway with regard to deportations in the cities and towns of America specifically focused on the worst—those that are here illegally and have also committed crimes that that operation is underway. The goal is to make a consequence for what was, you know, an illegal act, and then a further illegal acts when they got into the communities that they now live. And so to end that problem, or make it smaller so that we don’t notice it as much. It’s part, I think, in this whole continuum of being able to trust the government when they say that the border is under control. We’re going to vet the people that are here. And we’re going to—we’re going to do things that that give people confidence that they can be safe.

BRIDI: We have a question from our virtual audience.

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Delphine Schrank.

Q: Hello. My name is Delphine Schrank. I’m an independent journalist based in Mexico, writing a book about Central America.

I’m curious, you haven’t mentioned once root causes. Has that been abandoned as part of the strategy of immigration? Perhaps Andrea could address this specifically. But it’s certainly been, from the ground, evident that in the last four years the root causes portfolio wasn’t given priority and wasn’t addressed. But in the past, there had been measurable results for it, that speak to the incentives of people leaving. And I’m curious if you can bring that into the discussion. Thanks.

FLORES: Thank you for that question. So, no, root causes hasn’t been abandoned. But if you looked at last four years, in comparison to the Obama administration where you really heard that strategy be announced as a major migration management response, so you saw the Biden administration start out very similarly, where they focused primarily on three Central American countries known as the Northern Triangle, and they dedicated sort of private sector partnerships there, and the vice president’s focus there. But that was missing how global migration in the region had changed, right? So the root causes in Venezuela. Why weren’t we doing more as a nation to help Colombia? Why weren’t we anticipating the mass migration of Haitians coming up through Chile and Brazil? So root causes really change dramatically.

And it’s something that we put out from FWD’s new border framework, because what we actually acknowledge is that the control of the border, it actually starts in the country of origin when an individual decides that they are—you know, if they’re internally displaced. And so what is U.S. policy towards internally displaced people? All right, so once you go on from there, what if they have to leave because they cannot safely stay in their country, they’re being persecuted? Well, then what are we doing as a nation? So this is—this is what I think the future of the root causes strategy is—what are we doing to support people to stay one country over? Because when you talk to migrants many of them didn’t want to continue to move along the migratory route, but countries—due to their economies and the resources they have—sometimes push migrants up because they simply can’t integrate them. So what are we doing there?

And then additionally, you know, regional, sort of, processing options have to be part of the solution. So, you know, we see Republican bills that have been introduced in the past, they say embassies and consulates should play a role. They should. They should be doing some form of screening. They should be doing some form of adjudications in the region. Once again, I’m always thinking, how can you avoid someone having to use a smuggling network and how do you get them to use our immigration system instead? But those pathways don’t exist, right? And so President Biden did try to create what they called Safe Mobility Offices, which I think is also a future of the root causes strategy. It’s an evolution. And so that allowed some form of screening in the countries who would agree that those Mobility Offices could be created.

But I think we really have to move away from this black and white view of the border and say the only thing we can do is what we can do at the border. What we can do as a country is actually throughout the region, and see migration as the way it happens, is the way people move, and as the way they make decisions. I think that’s the future. And then obviously I think the future is also finally reconciling what we do with the undocumented population.

BRIDI: Right. Take a question from the back.

Q: Jim Traub, with ForeignPolicy.com.

Andrea made the point that this is not just about the border. And so I wanted to ask about something we haven’t talked about too much, which is legal migration, and whether that’s a problem as well. Because until, I don’t know, ten or fifteen years ago, the debate was, are we letting in too many people legally? Is chain migration the problem? Are we letting in the wrong kinds of people? So I’m wondering, if indeed one does get operational control, so that the anger over the border goes away to some extent and we then have a debate about who and how many, are there too many people who were already coming in under the 1965 law? Were the wrong kind of people coming in? What would be a better way?

BRIDI: Yeah.

FLORES: OK. That’s a great question. I have so many responses to it. (Laughter.) But I like to start with the premise that immigration has been very good for America, right? I am sitting here because Arizona needed Mexican labor at the turn of the century. And here I am today, at the Council on Foreign Relations, you know, influencing policy. And I think that’s a beautiful story that so many people in this room can relate to. But the question on legal immigration is honestly just as fraught, right, because it gets into who are we as a country at the moment that you’re asking how many people might we need. And I think our economy regularly answers that question.

At FWD, we’ve actually done a lot of look at rural communities. And we look at where the economy will be in—like, in 2050. And the only way that we continue to grow economically is actually by increasing our levels of immigration, which maybe right now feels politically impossible. But I would prefer that the best way to happen is through some modernization of legal immigration. And we’re not unique. This is not a uniquely American problem. The United States is actually extremely lucky that so many immigrants still want to come here, because you saw other countries pursue what I call restrictionism, or far more restrictive policies. They’re also aging. They also don’t have, you know, the birth rates that are replacing the working age population.

And so I would rather be us and trying to figure out how to create order, and more pathways, and really work with rural communities—with what they’ve actually asked for and what they’ve needed. I think some of the inquiries I get most around the country are not from the border and not from major urban areas. It’s from places like Nebraska, who I routinely will get outreach from, saying: How do we, you know, push for getting us eldercare workers, childcare workers? How do we get some restaurant workers to revitalize some of our small towns?

We can’t get stuck in legal immigration, border, legalization anymore. You know, it’s a different conversation. It’s what’s going to keep our economy growing, and then what’s good for our communities. Because integration is a piece of it. And I think that’s—I will say, as an immigration policy expert, we’ve been very bad at talking about the communities that receive immigrants, and how we support them, and American interests in immigration. And I think you really have to help Americans understand it’s not about whether 1965 was poorly designed. Did we support communities when immigration increased? Probably not, because integration isn’t a priority up there with other immigration issues. So I’m very pro, why don’t we offer, you know, English language courses? Why doesn’t the federal government provide that? How do you help facilitate a new immigrant’s arrival, so they don’t create the type of social challenges that any country faces when they increase immigration? So I think talking about the future—this panel is about the future, and I’m very idealistic—but that’s where I think that question should go.

BRIDI: OK. Sir.

Q: My name is—(coughs)—excuse me. My name is Joel Cohen. I work at the Rockefeller University down the street.

I would like to ask at least two of the people on the panel to address the meaning of “criminal.” Is it something that has to be determined by a trial with facts presented? Or is it something that can be determined on the spur of the moment by an arresting officer? I haven’t seen any evidence that the Venezuelans who were rounded up and deported included only criminals, by the legal definition. And so I’d like to ask Mr. Vitiello and our moderator, Mr. Bridi, to address who is a criminal? And how do we decide that this person is a criminal?

VITIELLO: Well, there’s absolutely a legal definition, in the sense of if you’re convicted of a crime that makes you a criminal. But it is also true in the law that if you cross the border without being inspected, without being invited, that’s also a violation of law. So you have committed a crime. And America—you know, the job of CBP—we don’t want that to happen anymore on the southwest border. And—

Q: (Off mic.)

VITIELLO: Usually by direct observation. And if not, you know, an encounter and a small—a short interview. Some people—you know, in the last several years, since about 2014, a lot of the migration across the southwest border were people who actually announced to officials that they were here illegally and they wanted to be taken into custody, because since 2014 we’ve had these major surges. Part of what drives a surge is the incentive of being released into the United States, whether you’re an asylee, or a refugee, or you have you have a chance to have status in the U.S. If you’re released at the border to go live your dream in the United States, you encourage a lot more people to come. And that’s what’s been happening in these major surges on the southwest border.

BRIDI: And generally, after release, in the old system—in, let’s call it, the pre detention system, generally after release you have a next step where you have a hearing before an immigration judge. So that would be—because of the big backlog, these hearings often took years. So they were able to get work authorization and sort of live normally, although in a bit of limbo. So now they’re being detained, and the next step normally is to be—to have a hearing. OK, so we have more in the room.

Q: Hi. Avi Kaza. Formerly with the Biden administration at USAID. So thanks, for all of you, for your public service, including you, Alfredo. So thanks for all of you.

I wanted to—and, Ron, you brought up a secondary question that was related to my primary question, but—so I’ll tag along, but—or add it on. But my primary question was kind of, what—the changes. Kind of, like, the dramatic change in the border—these issues, right? The facts and figures. And I really appreciated your—Ron, your Jan and Feb numbers, right? The facts and figures. And then you just mentioned 2014. And so kind of, what have—you know, over the last, you know, five, ten, twenty years, like, what—some of these facts and figures that have—and underlying things that have driven these changes. I’d love to learn more on what has caused these dramatic changes over, you know, these last decade or two.

VITIELLO: Well, there’s—earlier in my career we used to talk about push and pull factors, right? So you’re being pushed out of a place like Venezuela, or you’re being pushed out of, you know, the Northern Triangle, because there’s no opportunity. You know, the economy is suffering either from inflation or the crops aren’t coming in. There’s rust in the coffee. So it drives people away from home. So that’s the—that’s the push. The pull is economic opportunity. And you can live your dreams in this country. You can become, you know, what you want to be here. We still have that opportunity here in a free society.

But one of the large incentives—one of the pull factors was a release into the United States. 2014 was the first time in modern history, and in my career, where entire families were being pushed or being pulled into the United States. Young children, with their mom and with their dad. They were coming in large numbers that we had never seen before. And the government was ill equipped at the time to counter that surge, to do anything. And what happens is the system gets overwhelmed. And those people are released into the United States. They call back home to where other people are getting pushed out of their community, and they tell them, hey, they let us go at the border. We’re in New York. We’re in Aurora, Colorado. We’re in Los Angeles, California. And we’re, you know, sending money home.

And that incentive keeps these surges going until the incentives go away. And that’s what happened on the 20^th. The end of catch and release—they didn’t call it that, but releases are not allowed at the border without, you know, a strict guideline. And people aren’t allowed to stay. And those that make it into detention, or the short-term detention, are being removed quickly. So we’ve ended the incentive that encourages people to be pulled in.

BRIDI: All right. We have a question here.

Q: Sam Koplewicz at International Rescue Committee.

Just based on your last answer, it sounds like you’re saying this cut, this—you know, a 6 percent cut, is solely due to the end of an incentive, the deterrence. So we think—do we think that’s going to last? Is that what everyone’s perspective is, that this significant cut is just because of that?

VITIELLO: Well, it’s not a 6 percent cut, right—

Q: Sorry, a sixth. Sorry, a sixth. Is that right? What were the numbers, again?

VITIELLO: The numbers are—it’s 96 percent less activity at the southwest border than we had all of last year, but on average.

Q: OK. And, sorry, I guess my question is, do we think that that’s going to last and that’s only due to this non-release change in policy? Or do we think—I mean, I think we were hearing more that people are waiting and seeing?

VITIELLO: I think I agree that there’s a wait and see aspect to this, both from the individuals that are in the pipeline. But there’s also evidence that people are abandoning the journey, right? They’re turning around in the Darian Gap. They’re exiting the country. Some of them are fleeing into Canada. So there is a change in the direction of the pipeline. But the incentives—or, the release into the United States encourages people to come here. And we were doing a lot of that for the last four years. And that ended on the 20^th. And so is it sustainable? Not without, you know, a broader look at the framework that allows for it, not without a continued investment in resources so that you can establish control at the border and demonstrate that to the American public.

FLORES: I have one response to that. So I see it slightly differently. So, yes, because President Biden had negotiated a deal with Mexico at the end of 2023, that’s when you saw the huge, precipitous drop in numbers. And why? Same thing when we—I know we worked together in the Obama administration in 2015. A huge drop in numbers, because Mexico was funded and supported in massively increasing its enforcement, as I’m sure you well know. And so what I often tell people, there’s a fragility in what we’re seeing right now. And there’s been a fragility for every single president, because at any moment if Mexico changed policies or if its incentives change, numbers could go up tomorrow, right? And we still have the same facilities, the same broken processes. You can’t maintain no catch and release when you have the same small spaces, far smaller than this room in many cases, of hundreds and hundreds of human beings. You have to do releases.

You have to do it for public safety, because no one would agree that when we’ve had crises—you know, 2014 it was about unaccompanied children. And so those facilities have not been modernized. We talk a lot about, in our framework, if you don’t modernize infrastructure that you actually process people in, then our border can always be overwhelmed. It is always a ticking time bomb. And so no president could be successful with the system at the border in place right now because we share a land border with another country. So you can never just declare mission accomplished because you’re always having to manage all the different sort of factors that go into migration. And there could be a pandemic, there could be a storm in Mexico, there could be—we’re looking at Peru right now. That could be a new sending country. That could be a new refugee crisis. And the question is, do you have an immigration system in place that it can manage that in an orderly, humane way? So you can’t just end releases, right? Or else, people will lose their lives.

CORCHADO: Just real quick. I mean, there’s a lot of factors. But I think one of the biggest factors is jobs. If there are jobs, job, jobs in the U.S. waiting—I mean, or if Sheinbaum and President Trump did not get along, and suddenly relations are—you know, they break off and Mexico is not cooperating, I mean, it’s a whole new ballgame. And, I mean, to your question, I mean, I’ve been following this guy for five years. He came under President Trump because a gang had killed one of his neighbors, and was going after him. He picks—he had five kids, picks the one kid he thought could it to the journey. Ended up in north Texas. And he worshiped President Trump. (Laughs.) He said, you know, because of Mr. Trump I have this opportunity.

He has basically disappeared in the last week. I mean, he’s off the parole. He changed houses, because he knows that they’re coming after him. And he’s moving around trying—because the jobs keep him going. I said, why don’t you just go home? You know, time for you go home. He says—he says, I can’t. Too many people are calling me. They want me to do this, so I’m going to do that. So that whole job thing, I mean, it’s a big, big deal. I mean, people don’t migrate because they think it’s a cool experience. It’s an adventure. I mean, it takes a lot out of you to make that decision.

Q: (Off mic.) Oh, sorry. What’s the price tag on operational control, on integrating once people arrive, and on kind of reducing some of those push factors, supporting IDPs and refugees in the countries that they’re from?

VITIELLO: On the enforcement side, it’s very expensive. I think the reconciliation—when they started the planning for it, which is now several months old, that number was 86 billion (dollars). It’s probably twice that now, because they’re trying to fit in all of the things. We want to have a system that can be sustained as it relates to the physical operations and then all the downstream needs that will be required. But, yeah, the price tag is very high.

CORCHADO: And I think the Trump administration is also paying for optics. I mean, if you look at the—there’s about 360 flights that have left. Thirteen of them are military. They cost, like, three times what a normal ICE plane would cost. So I think you also have to factor in the additional costs that are being brought in to scare the heck out of people.

BRIDI: All right. There are a lot of questions in the room, so I’m going to ask people to keep them short. And we’ll try and go back and forth as long as we can. In the back.

Q: Hello. Thanks for the comments. My name is Ethar El-Katatney. I’m an editor-in-chief of Documented, which is a New York City newsroom that focuses on the city’s immigrants and the policies that impact their lives.

It’s been a very busy few months. I’m also an immigrant myself. And to your point, my father comes from a village in upper Egypt. And here I am today, a term member at CFR. I guess we touched on some of the, kind of, stats around immigration—which are the positive ones, the low levels of crime, the actual data around within a hundred years without immigrants the population of this country will actually contract. The New Yorker had a great article this month, literally called The End of Children, that if you look at the labor market over the last fifteen, twenty years, it actually nearly contracts without immigration. That generally all of the data supports immigration is extremely important for America, and the fact that we can have a question within this room that asks about is legal immigration itself also bad I think just kind of highlights some of the rhetoric and the framing around immigration that is just kind of—you know, across the country.

So I guess my question is, which we kind of haven’t touched on at all, why is immigration still this kind of scapegoat, where we—you know, just remember some of the words, around poison of the country, around rapists and criminals, Springfield, Ohio eating cats. Without Haitians and without immigration, that town would have pretty much kind of died. So I would love to hear a little bit more around the rhetoric and narrative around immigration and why, out of all of the issues, this is the one that, even though it is actually—all of the data empirically shows it is incredible for America, and America is lucky to have immigrants—lucky to have me, lucky to have you, and so many of us, lucky to have you—why is this the kind of touch point and rallying point? Thanks.

VITIELLO: To me, it revolves around the trust. I mean, just the one, micro example of this last four years. We had a secretary of Homeland Security who knew exactly how the border worked and what was—what would work and what would not work as it related to enforcement policy and the downstream impacts of post-arrest and post-hearing and all the asylum claims, et cetera, et cetera. And then he came on the stage as the secretary, knowing full well what would work and what wouldn’t work, and watched it crumble in front of his eyes and told us all that there wasn’t a crisis at the border, and that the border was closed. When we saw thousands of people, up to 10,000 in the in the peak of it—10,000 people every twenty-four hours coming into the United States. And they continued to tell us that it was just going to be fine, that it wasn’t a problem, and that it wasn’t—they refused to call it a crisis.

And so it’s not just the fear that people have both—rational and irrational—but it’s also our own government telling us this is not a problem. It is not going to be a problem. And then you saw the downstream impacts of thousands of people in a hotel here in New York City, with no real future in the city. And then the other crimes that were committed by people who had just gotten here that wouldn’t have been here otherwise. And so it drives fear, because there are real risks and impacts for an out-of-control, chaotic border that affects every city and town in America.

Q: (Off mic)—the data, something like the Laken Riley Act. But the data—again, not to drill into it—lower levels of crime, similar levels of education, similar levels of income, paying taxes. That when you look at the numbers, this simply isn’t true.

VITIELLO: I would just say, about Laken Riley, like that one is one too many in that case. Like, you can’t tell her parents that it was OK for this person to be here and do what they did to their daughter. That’s a completely unavoidable scenario. We don’t have to live like that in 2024.

FLORES: But what I’ll say about the Laken Riley bill, which is striking, is that it is the first bipartisan immigration bill that’s been passed in my career. And why was it supported by both parties? Why did they surpass the filibuster, which was something that was not surpassed after so many different immigration deals? And it was because of sort of this political definition of immigration all being subsumed by the border, right? And so I think—I think both parties have really failed Americans on this, because there has been a very concerted effort—and, once again, the United States isn’t unique. I think immigration restrictionism is popular. It’s had many different appearances throughout our country’s history. And it is globally a way that you often see perhaps more authoritarian-leaning leaders use immigration as a wedge issue to create fear.

But there’s been a lot more investment, I think, on that side of things, quite frankly, than you see investment in the facts. And I think about a fact that, I think, surprised me recently. I worked on the creation of the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals Program in 2012. I hadn’t even, like, looked back to see that they’ve contributed over $40 billion to, like, they paid in taxes, right? And I was, like, wait, I haven’t heard the Democrats say that in a really long time, right? And I worked for President Biden. And I remember in that first year we were subsumed by the border crisis, right? And that there was a day-one bill, I honestly can’t even remember what was in it, right? You didn’t see that push.

You didn’t even see Senator Schumer or Pelosi put up—well, Senator Pelosi did—or, I mean—(laughs)—Speaker of the House Pelosi did. I’m making her a senator. But you didn’t see a push on, like, the DREAM Act, in the same way that you see Republicans push on tough votes, right? So I do think there needs to be a strengthening. And both parties have failed. Both parties have been dishonest on this issue. And I think Americans are really sick of it. And I hope that more conversations like these happen because you have to air out what are the facts, and then what kind of nation are we going to be. But it is fundamental to who we are. And we’re multiracial, multiethnic. And it’s not going to be easy to define who will be future Americans.

CORCHADO: I mean, I would just end it with, as a border resident, it’s very clear to us that the United States, they need—they need this fear. They need the enemy. They need to go to the border, put the props, hit the pinata. Pinatas are usually pretty happy events, but in this case you hit the pinata and you see the money fall, and you help dole up the money to people running for office, et cetera. I mean, that’s—it’s become that cynical for us. Because they used to be that every—maybe once every four years people will go down, people will remember the border. And now it’s every day, or every other day, and it’s the same thing.

BRIDI: Alfredo, I’m going to have to cut you off. I’m so sorry. We’re overtime. And I want to—I want to let people go. But thank you to all. I agree, these conversations are incredibly important to have. Thank you for all the questions in the room and online. On behalf of the panelists, thank you for being here. Thank you to the panelists. Thank you also to the Silberstein family for hosting this lecture. And to all of you, thanks again. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.