Cecilia Muñoz

Thank you so much.

Yeah. So I'm the daughter of immigrants and the wife of an immigrant. And I've been working on immigration really since I was a graduate student. First as providing services to immigrants. I ran a legalization program back in the 80s, which is the last time we legalized undocumented people in significant numbers. And so I've kind of been doing policy and advocacy ever since.

It's kind of fundamental to who I am.

So I think it's pretty well understood that the Biden administration was slow. I think voters saw the Biden administration as being slow to respond to the situation at the border. I'm obviously close to the folks in the Biden administration. I know they worked incredibly hard.

I think they ultimately landed on some pretty thoughtful policy and policy which turned out to be pretty effective in the end. But by the time they got there, it was too late to persuade voters that they were serious and they had endured, by that point, years of hammering away at how much of a crisis this is and all of the crazy tough ways that Donald Trump was going to address it.

And the thing which is uncomfortable about I think both in the advocacy community and therefore uncomfortable for the administration, was saying out loud that they believed this was a thing that needed to be controlled. It is really, really easy to push back on immigration enforcement. I spent a lot of years of my career doing it as well.

It is really hard to have a vision for how enforcement should happen. And politically, for a Democrat in office, it's a world of pain if you stand up and say, this is how we should enforce the law.

But at the end of the day, especially because the situation at the border is unlike anything we have experienced before in our history, I think the public expects their leaders to have a theory of the case for how to do it and to be assertive about it. And I think the

I have a lot of praise for the Biden administration and a lot of affection for the Biden administration, but I think it was pretty clear that he didn't want to talk about this issue until he had to, because it's a world of pain. But at the end of the day, I think we need to accept that the American public expects its officials to bring order and fairness to the border.

And I think if we can be persuasive that we can bring order and fairness to the border, the American public is also prepared to be really, to be generous. And that's why in the Obama years, the comprehensive immigration reform frame won the majority of the public by a lot, had tremendous public support. And that's why we argue a balanced approach that includes

A theory of the case for how to manage the border, along with a path to permanent status for people who are here illegally and openings and legal immigration. That's a balance which I think can win the public. But for the time being, we have lost the public on this issue. Democrats have lost the public. And that's a catastrophe.

I think ultimately the policy formulation that they landed on is a really good one. We know that it's effective because actually the pressure at the border, the number of folks entering unlawfully has gone down. But they didn't start talking about it until too late. So I think an aggressive approach that said from the beginning, we recognize that this is a challenge.

Here's how we're going to handle it in the region, in the hemisphere. They actually adopted a lot of really solid policy to give people the ability to get to safety without making the dangerous journey to the United States. They created mechanisms to move people from entering in between ports of entry and channeling them to ports of entry. They got a lot of pushback for doing that.

But ultimately, that allowed them to regulate how many people come in a day. They got there, but they got there kind of late. And they were, I think, reluctant to make a forceful case, in part because if a Democrat makes a forceful case, you get a lot of pushback from within the family. And so I think the mistakes were not so much policy mistakes.

They, I think, started from the point of view that they did not want to talk about it. I think the sense was any day that this is the thing in the news that we're talking about is a bad day. And I think that was the mistake.

Absolutely. I mean, the argument that Frank and I are trying to make in the piece that we wrote is that Democrats should lean in. And I think the instinct that has taken hold is to run away from the issue. But the... There is history that demonstrates that when the frame is who's going to be tough, this is Donald Trump's frame, right?

Who's going to be tough as opposed to not tough, that we have a hard time competing with that. But the frame that works for Democrats is leaning in and with an approach that actually solves the problem. When the frame is fix it versus chaos, right? Democrats tend to do well. And we have been having this debate on Donald Trump's frame for way too long.

And the way to move it back to our frame is to lean in and with a theory of the case on how to address this. And I think the good news is the policy part is available. This isn't an intractable problem. This is a problem with policy solutions, but we have to be willing to talk about them and embrace them. And they include enforcement, which is uncomfortable.

But obviously, that's preferable to what we're all about to endure over the next four years.

Yeah. President Obama had the kind of balanced approach that Frank, Sherry, and I are advocating for, in that he had a theory of the case that included an approach to immigration enforcement, but also a path to citizenship for undocumented people and expansions to legal immigration. And that was, from the public point of view, the desirable policy, right?

70%, 80%, 85% of the public supported that approach. He also had a theory of the case on how to conduct immigration enforcement. I think it's a fair criticism to say that it took us too long to land on the right approach. There was a lot of trial and error from, say, 2010 when we really started tweaking how enforcement happens to 2014.

But essentially, the premise was you have to conduct immigration enforcement, but how you do it matters. And instead of concentrating on people in the interior who have been here for a long time, the priorities should be new arrivals, people who haven't set down roots yet, and folks with serious criminal convictions. And ultimately, that's the set of enforcement choices that makes sense.

That's also the most humane. But because the removal numbers were high, and the removal numbers were high because there were a lot of new entrants that the Obama administration removed. You know, he got named by my former boss, the deporter-in-chief, and that has stuck.

And what happened in the advocacy world from that era onward is that folks moved to the left and focused very heavily on immigration enforcement. And so their request to Secretary Clinton when she was running was to move away from immigration enforcement. And she did. She did an interview with Jorge Ramos yesterday.

which essentially backed away from the kind of enforcement infrastructure that President Obama had outlined. Immigration enforcement was barely mentioned in her platform at all. They extracted a promise from Joe Biden when he was running to do a moratorium on enforcement, which he did, which he announced, but which ultimately did not withstand legal scrutiny.

And the candidates that were running for the Democratic nomination were all asked about decriminalizing border crossings. The entire conversation moved to the left, away from immigration enforcement, and created the impression that Democrats were not serious about imposing order and fairness at the border. And I think that has cost us very, very dearly. It's not a comfortable subject.

Look, you know, I'm a Latina. I'm an immigration policy expert. This is a very uncomfortable subject, but the Honestly, John, the reason that Frank and I wrote this piece, I feel very strongly. I am not convinced we're going to be able to take our country back from the autocrats if we don't get our arms around this issue.

What's happening at the border is happening at a scale that the country has not seen before, ever. And it is not a short-term emergency. It is the beginning of what's coming because of climate change and other things.

If we do not have a theory of a case for how to do this in an orderly way that allows us to welcome folks, but with conditions, I really fear for our ability to take the country back from the autocrats.

I think a couple of things happened. As I mentioned, they focused very heavily on enforcement and that became kind of the center. The situation of undocumented people, which is work well worth doing, and the risks of immigration enforcement to them became kind of the focal point of the move to the left.

And we stopped having a conversation that included advocates and folks who were governing or folks who were seeking to govern about how can this actually work? And advocates instead landed in a place where they focused on the trade-offs that were part of the comprehensive immigration reform model, right?

The getting to the back of the line, the fact that some people legalized, but not everybody, and decided that that was trading off A benefit for some people at the expense of other people and that they, in fact, tossed out the entire comprehensive immigration reform model and began really to focus pretty heavily on enforcement.

And then, of course, there was a heck of a lot of terrible to respond to in the Trump years. You know, and that, I think, the response to Trump, I think, contributed to the singular focus of where the advocacy community landed. And look, that is heroic work. It's incredibly difficult work, incredibly emotional work. Like, you know, they took people's children.

And the advocates that I'm talking about were at the front lines of addressing that. I have nothing but respect for that work and for the people who do it. But the...

When you were describing the job of advocates is to push and the job of people who are governing is to govern, when we do it really well, all of those people's jobs is also to be in a conversation about what the policy solution is to the problem at hand. And as an advocate, you are, of course, pushing for the best possible outcome, but you're in the conversation.

And that conversation has really broken down. And as a result, Democrats don't have a working theory of the case that they can say out loud about how to address the border situation. And that's tragic because this Democratic administration is actually kind of doing it pretty well. But we can't talk about it because you get shot at.

Yeah, it's going to be worse. We know that. Maybe not in all the ways that he has promised, because some of the stuff he wants to do is going to be pretty hard for him to do, but it's going to be worse. I think the thing we didn't do as well as I would have liked last time is have a consistent narrative that makes it clear.

There is a goal that generally the American public agrees on, which is to bring order and fairness to this system. That goal is valid. We didn't say that. But there's a right way and a wrong way to go about achieving it. And we are about to tell you, we're about to see a lot of what the wrong way looks like.

The harms of what the Trump administration is about to do, the greatest harms are likely to be visited on children. I think we're likely to see workplace raids, for example. We saw those in the George W. Bush era. What that looks like is kids go to school in the morning, and when they come back at the end of the day, their parents are gone. So those kinds of, we know that that's what happens.

We are sadly, tragically about to be able to tell the story to the American public about what it costs those families, what it costs those kids, what it costs those communities and what it costs all of us. That narrative should also include that this is the wrong way to go about accomplishing the country's goals, but there is a right way. And the goal is not the problem.

It's how we're going about trying to accomplish it. To lay the predicate for... That frame that I was talking about, like Democrats need to own the, we're the ones who know how to fix challenging problems. These guys create chaos and harm and they harm really vulnerable people that most of the country, I hope, believes we shouldn't be harming.

But we have to lean in and we have to be prepared to say that the goal that the American people want, which is an orderly and fair system, is legit.

Yes, and try to force us into a position of appearing to make the argument that no one should ever be deported, ever. And that's not good policy. It's not where the public is, and it's not where we should be either. But you're right that it will require, I think, discipline to not have this debate on Donald Trump's terms, but to swing the debate back to our terms.

Because we need to win elections, and we need to get this policy challenge addressed.

Yeah. No, it's an enormous challenge. It's not a short-term thing. We're not going to fix this in the short term because Congress is a catastrophe. I think it starts with having a vision for what needs to happen and being able to persuade the American public that that's the right vision. Look, I think we have, honestly, the debate is happening around the extremes.

And I think the public really wants there to be a center. And we need to provide it for starters. And create the momentum so that it's safe for Democrats to have a conversation about enforcement and safe for at least some number of Republicans to have a conversation about the kind of immigration system that we want to have.

I fear that we are now in a situation where the kind of permission structure to allow us to get to that conversation requires that we successfully manage the situation at the border. I think... I think that is true now in a way that was not true a decade ago when, you know, in the Obama years when we passed immigration comprehensive reform through the Senate.

The situation at the border was not then what it is now. And the country expects it to be addressed. So I now think that has to be kind of the primary piece. But I also think if you can be persuasive that that is manageable, and I do believe that's possible.

then I still believe the American public is prepared to have a conversation about a pathway to permanent status for the people who are here on temporary statuses or without status at all. And even an expansion of legal immigration. I mean, the great irony is the business community knows we need immigrants. They know we need more of them.

It's not just that we will be cooking our own goose economically if we deport people who are here now. It's that we're going to need more generous immigration for the long term. And the business community knows it. They're just terrified of saying anything out loud. So we need to make it safe again to have this conversation. But I think...

As an advocate or a former advocate, I don't know if the advocacy world would embrace me any longer, but we need to do a better job of listening to where the public is. As a Latina, honestly, I think we haven't even done enough listening to where our own community is, as this election shows. And we have to fix that. And that requires some humility.

I think it requires some listening and willing to make some hard decisions hard policy choices in order to get to the outcomes that we need. And honestly, I really think the fate of democracy in the United States depends on this.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it.