| Andrea Flores’s efforts to roll back Trump’s immigration policies faced opposition inside and outside the White House.  Photograph by Nate Palmer for The New Yorker As the director of border management on the National Security Council, Andrea Flores was tasked with fulfilling Joe Biden’s campaign promise of ending a policy that had left tens of thousands of asylum seekers stranded in Mexico, often in dangerous conditions, while awaiting hearings in the U.S. For Flores, it was a dream job, and, in the first months of her tenure, she led a process that helped thirteen thousand migrants enter the country. “No one heard about it because it ran so smoothly,” one Administration official explained to Jonathan Blitzer, who wrote about Flores’s successes but also about the procedural setbacks and internal resistance that ultimately led her to leave the White House. Blitzer had been seeking Flores out as a source for some time. I asked him why Flores’s experiences in Washington were so useful in understanding Biden’s immigration policies and the hurdles facing meaningful reform. “She is someone who is young, smart, experienced, and idealistic, but also, almost in spite of her idealism, very careful as an operations expert,” Blitzer told me. “She is also from the border herself, and the collision of empty political rhetoric and posturing with the reality of policymaking in the borderlands really hit home for her.” —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor Read the story. | 
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