Ken Salazar, the former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico under Joe Biden, is now publicly accusing the administration he served of fumbling the border crisis through inaction, poor communication, and misplaced priorities.
Salazar, who also served as Interior Secretary under Barack Obama and as Colorado's attorney general, laid out his case in a new book titled "Borderlands" and in an interview with Fox News Digital. His central charge is blunt: the Biden White House treated Mexico and the broader Western Hemisphere as an afterthought while the border fell apart, and by the time officials acted, the political damage was already done.
The critique carries weight precisely because of who is delivering it. Salazar is no Republican operative. He is a lifelong Democrat who held senior posts under two Democratic presidents and whose family, by his own account, has lived in the American Southwest since the land was still part of Mexico. When a man with those credentials says the administration he represented abroad "woke up too late," the indictment is hard to wave away.
In "Borderlands," Salazar recounts a trip to Mexico with Biden and several inner-circle officials that nearly ended his tenure as ambassador. After a meeting at Mexico City's Palacio Nacional, Salazar prepared to present his plan the following day, only to discover that he and former Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had been cut out of the key follow-up session.
The snub pushed Salazar close to resigning. Instead, he secured a private meeting with Biden and delivered a warning that reads, in hindsight, like a prophecy of the political disaster that followed.
Salazar told Biden:
"We need someone in the White House to oversee the border, migration, Mexico, and the Americas. No one is in charge now. We need a border and migration czar."
He pressed further, urging Biden to appoint a single official with real authority, someone modeled on Jeffrey Zients, the adviser who had coordinated the COVID-19 response, to cut through the bureaucratic tangle and speak with one voice on border policy.
"[We need] someone focused exclusively on this crisis, with the authority to coordinate and direct action across agencies in Washington and communicate the message with one voice on these issues. With all due respect, Mr. President, if we are to succeed, it is urgent that we have someone like this in charge."
Biden did not follow the advice. The result, in Salazar's telling, was an administration that drifted for years without a clear chain of command on the most politically explosive domestic issue in the country. Even Kamala Harris has distanced herself from Biden's record, leaving him off her list of America's most effective presidents.
Salazar did not limit his criticism to the organizational chart. He argued that the Biden White House lacked urgency from the start, and that the absence of a communications strategy left a vacuum that Republicans filled with ease.
Fox News Digital reported Salazar saying:
"From day one, there should have been a great sense of urgency in addressing the crisis of a broken border and the migration crisis that we are seeing."
He added that the failure to act fast created a trap the administration never escaped:
"I think that's what trapped the administration into this sense that they woke up too late by the time they did the right things to get control of the border."
Salazar pointed to Biden's June 2024 executive order as evidence that the right tools existed all along. He wrote in his book that the order "sharply reduced crossings", but the administration failed to communicate that success before Biden exited the presidential race. By then, the narrative was set. The border had become, in Salazar's words, "low-hanging fruit" for political opponents.
That pattern, act late, explain never, is a familiar one for Americans who watched illegal border crossings surge for years while administration officials avoided the word "crisis." The consequences of that failure did not land on White House staffers. They landed on border communities, on local law enforcement, and on American families left to absorb the human cost of policies that prioritized messaging over enforcement.
Salazar spread blame across party lines, though his sharpest observations cut against his own side. He argued that Republicans, including Donald Trump, have treated the border as a political weapon for more than two decades, using it to win elections rather than to build durable solutions.
But his critique of Democrats was more revealing. Salazar said his party focuses narrowly on domestic immigration reform and the physical border itself while ignoring the broader regional dynamics that drive migration, particularly the relationship with Mexico and conditions at Mexico's own southern border with Guatemala.
"Democrats, on the other hand, have a sense that it is very important. And they do focus, but only on the border and on domestic migration issues [like] immigration reform. They don't focus at all or enough on Mexico [or] the [border between Mexico and Guatemala], And that's what I believe we have to do."
He described U.S. foreign policy as trapped in an "east-west paradigm", looking toward Asia and Europe while neglecting the Western Hemisphere, and said that pattern has persisted for roughly a century. His book proposes a "Borderlands Platform" built around a "New American Alliance" among the United States, Mexico, and Canada, featuring deeper security cooperation, expanded legal labor mobility, and renewed investment in North American trade.
Salazar wrote supportively about renewing the USMCA, the trade agreement President Trump negotiated to replace Bill Clinton's NAFTA. That endorsement, a Democratic diplomat praising a signature Trump achievement, underscores how far Salazar's analysis sits from the progressive orthodoxy that dominated Biden-era immigration debate.
He also made a broader point about values that conservative readers will recognize. Salazar said the current state of affairs violates basic American principles of security and rule of law.
"It's not the American way where people have rights, where you have a sense of security, understand the importance of our security within our own country and the importance for supporting law enforcement."
Salazar confirmed that he has met with several Democrats viewed as potential 2028 presidential contenders, including Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who endorsed "Borderlands." Salazar said he intends to push the border and the U.S.-Mexico relationship to the center of the next Democratic primary.
"Not that I have a lot of sway, but at least I will do everything I can to make sure that this is at the heart of every [Democrat running for president]."
Whether that effort gains traction remains to be seen. The Democratic Party's progressive wing has spent years resisting the language of border security, treating enforcement as inherently suspect and clashing with federal immigration authorities at every turn. Salazar's framework, which accepts that the border is "broken," endorses law enforcement, and praises a Trump-era trade deal, runs against that current.
Salazar acknowledged that the Trump administration has an opportunity on the economic front, noting that affordability is the dominant concern for American families.
"I do think that the Trump administration has an opportunity here because they, at the end of the day, recognize that the big questions of our time are affordability for the American people. The cost of strawberries, blueberries, and avocados, food, fuel, all those things are very much impacted by what's happening with tariffs and the uncertainty with Mexico right now."
He warned, however, that tariffs and trade uncertainty with Mexico are already hurting rural America. Salazar, who described spending time on his own ranch and pumping diesel into farm equipment, said agriculture faces serious trouble ahead.
"I spent a lot of time on our ranch, I pumped the diesel into our [machinery], and I can tell you that across rural America, people are hurting because of what's happening with trade and we are losing a lot of our advantage here. Agriculture is in for a very hard time in the years ahead."
Salazar said he would meet with Trump if invited but added that he would not allow himself to become "political fodder for anybody." He said he did not expect the invitation to come. Fox News Digital reached out to the White House and to Biden for comment; no response was reported.
Salazar's broader critique of U.S. foreign policy, that Washington has neglected its own hemisphere for a century, echoes a frustration shared by figures across the political spectrum. But his specific indictment of the Biden White House is the part that matters most right now. He served these people. He warned them in private. They ignored him. And millions of Americans paid the price at a border their own government refused to secure.
When the man you sent to Mexico City comes home and writes a book about how badly you failed, the spin is over. The record speaks for itself.
