Last December, Susan Rice and Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s incoming domestic policy advisor and national security advisor, sat for interviews with reporters along America’s southwest border to explain the president-elect’s bold plans on migration and refugees. They had two messages to convey. The first was that the incoming team had “a transformative vision,” as Rice put it, that encompassed $4 billion in strategic investments in the Central American countries from which migrants were fleeing, broader pathways for legal migration, and reforms to the tangled process of granting asylum at the border.
