The Department of Homeland Security bashed a guest essay published Tuesday in The New York Times by a former Biden administration official about how to solve America's immigration issues.
The essay was written by Blas Nuñez-Neto, the former assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at DHS under Biden. In it, he argued that "Congress has cynically allowed immigration to remain a toxic political issue" and that lawmakers need to pass legislative reforms.
"We have ended up with a system that is generous to those who cross the border and claim asylum and is frequently stingy with those who try to use appropriate legal pathways to come here to work," he argued.
DHS responded on its official X account.
“I was Humpty Dumpty. Here’s how to sit on a wall," the agency posted mockingly.
The Trump administration has consistently sought to portray illegal immigration as a problem caused by Democrats and worsened by the Biden administration's policies.
But Nuñez-Neto's essay pushed back on those notions, which could explain why DHS responded to the essay in the manner it did.
For instance, Nuñez-Neto reported that "Border Patrol encounters were actually lower when Mr. Biden left office in 2025 than when Mr. Trump did in 2021."
He also mentioned that an executive order Biden signed in 2024, implementing restrictions on asylum claims at the Southern Border, caused illegal entries to fall to their lowest point since the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
However, it seemed to be too late to "change the political narrative" about immigration by the time Biden left office, Nuñez-Neto argued.