The Opinions - America's Next Story: Cecilia Muñoz

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Immigration has always been central to the American story, yet many Americans remain dissatisfied with the Trump administration’s aggressive approach. So how does the country move forward on this issue?In this “America’s Next Story” series episode of “The Opinions,” David Leonhardt, an editorial director in Times Opinion, speaks with Cecilia Muñoz, who helped shape immigration policy under President Barack Obama. Ms. Muñoz explains that the openness of Mr. Biden’s immigration policy was an opportunity for Trump, and one he fully exploited. She urges the Democratic Party to find inspiration in her Obama-era immigration policy, to balance avenues for legal immigration with enforcement at the border.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur, Vishkaha Darbha and Kristina Samulewski. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Isaac Jones. Original music by Carole Sabouruad. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. And this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again. We the people, in order to form a more perfect humor. Ask not what your country can do for you. You ask what you can do for your country.

That America is too great for small dreams. Change is what's happening in America. And we will make America great again. God bless you and good night. I love you. The conversations that we've been having on this podcast series are about the American story. And it's hard to think of anything more central to that story than immigration.

We're the land of opportunity, a melting pot, a nation of immigrants. Americans love telling the stories of their own family's journeys to this country. And yet, immigration has gotten complicated. It's become a divisive topic in this country. Many people think that our borders have been too open in recent years, and that dissatisfaction was a big reason that President Trump won last year's election. So how can the country both take those concerns seriously and remain a nation of immigrants? I can't think of anybody better to grapple with that question than my guest today, Cecilia

Munoz. She spent her career working on immigration policy, both as part of a major Latino advocacy group and in the White House under President Obama. Cecilia is horrified by Trump's immigration policies. And she also believes that the Democratic Party messed up its own approach to immigration over the last decade. How should the country move forward on immigration? In this conversation, Cecilia Munoz offers an answer. Good to see you, Cecilia. Thanks for having me. So immigration isn't just foundational to our country.

It's also personal for so many of us. We carry around the stories of our ancestors. For me, that includes great grandparents who came here during the great wave of immigration in the late 1800s, and it includes my father's father who got here just in time from Europe in 1940. And so I wanted to ask you if we could start with you telling us a little bit about your American story and how your family got here. Yeah.

I'm the daughter of immigrants. My parents were born and raised in Bolivia. And they came in 1950. My father studied at the University of Michigan. Go blue. I did too. And things were not great in Bolivia at the time. So every year, they would write back to the family to say, is it time?

Can we come home? And the family would write and say, not yet, things aren't so good. And pretty soon they moved to Detroit. had a job in the auto industry, they had some children, and so I'm the youngest of four, we were all born in Detroit. And then a wave of relatives joined us, and that's really when the country became home. And what's so striking about that story is it is distinct. It involves your parents and Bolivia and Detroit, and yet it is so similar to so many stories in so many parts of this country. Oh, exactly, exactly. And all of the things that happen as part of the immigrant story,

including some of us keep speaking the language, some of us don't, but we still keep eating the food. Yep. Right? And so we hang on to those elements of our identity with great pride, but at the same time, we are unequivocally American. So now let's come forward from your childhood and growing up in Detroit and go to the early 2000s. And for so long, immigration felt like, and I think was a winning issue for the Democratic Party. People made fun of Mitt Romney for his self-deportation line. And I've pulled a sentence from the New York Times archives that I wrote, and unfortunately has not aged very well. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote the following.

It's hard, in fact, to see how a single 2008 Republican candidate benefited from anti-immigration rhetoric. Remember those days? I do remember them as far back as they now seem. Can you go back and talk to us about what was the message, the source? story that President Obama and you and the Democratic Party were telling about immigration in the early 2000s. Yes. President Obama's approach to immigration was one of balance. He believed very strongly that there was room for generous immigration policy that the immigration laws needed to be updated. The last time they were meaningfully updated was in 1991 before we carried cell phones,

before Google was a company like that we haven't, we're living now with an immigration law that was built for a time that's very different from the one we live in now. So he believed that you have to strike a balance. And in fact, really, every immigration law strikes this balance. It combines an approach to immigration enforcement at the border with generosity and pathways for legal immigration. And so that was his premise. He ran on that premise. Immigration was an issue sort of on the plus side of the ledger for candidate, Barack Obama. And in his second, he said, second term, the gang of eight formed in the Senate for Democrats, four Republicans, and the Senate in 2013 passes a bipartisan immigration reform bill with 68 votes, which is the kind of thing

that doesn't happen anymore on anything. The reason that bill never became law was because the Speaker of the House at the time never brought it to the floor because he feared a rebellion in his caucus. And we'll come back to the idea of what the future immigration policy should look like. I just want to hold on President Obama for a minute here because obviously he was an incredible advocate for pathways to citizenship. He also spoke with real passion about the importance of enforcing the law. That's right. And there's this incredible line from his 2008 acceptance speech, which I'm sure you remember at the Democratic National Convention, where he talks both about the idea that we cannot separate families.

And he uses the phrase illegal workers to describe some of the cost. of immigration. You know, passions may fly on immigration, but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. And I think when you talk about balance,

to me, it's not just that he seemed to believe one part of it and was doing the other for political reasons. It seemed genuine, and voters can tell when politicians are being genuine. It was genuine. The public has a right, to expect his government to enforce the law,

even if the law is problematic and outdated. And for President Obama, for his team, it was never a question whether immigration laws would be enforced. Your job when you go into government is to enforce the law such as it is and hopefully to reform the law when you think it needs reforming. The question was not whether to enforce immigration law.

The question was how. And when President Obama arrived at the White House, the strategy had been under the Bush, administration to conduct workplace raids and for the Department of Homeland Security to go after anybody that they could find. And what we concluded was that any police force worth its salt doesn't treat everybody the same in the sense that you don't expend as much energy going after a Jay Walker as you do an ax murderer, right? So we stopped workplace raids and we went about developing a set of criteria for enforcement, which was the first time the Department of Homeland Security

had any kind of prioritization. And the idea was, there are 11 million people here without immigration papers. We're not going to have the resources in those days to remove all of them. And so we're going to prioritize people with serious criminal convictions and people who have recently arrived, who have not yet set down roots, who don't really have the ability to stay. And The administration was so serious about those categories that we removed a lot of people. And, you know, there are people in my community, including my former boss, who labeled President Obama the Deporter-in-Chief. Any day now, this administration will reach the two million mark for deportations. This president has been the deporter in chief.

I'm sure you and President Obama talked about this inside the White House. How did you both think about this moral calculus? Let's set aside the people who've committed serious crimes. That seems easier. Someone arrives here. They believe probably rationally that their life would be better in the United States than it would be back home. But they don't have legal permission to be here. They don't qualify for asylum.

Why is it the government's responsibility to send many of those people home than to say, hey, you know what? they would be better off if they stayed. We should do the humanitarian thing and let them stay. The answer to that really, David, is that we have a border, and we have a border for a reason. And it is reasonable to enforce that border. Congress has the job of making the laws determining who qualifies to come and who doesn't qualify to come.

Now, Congress hasn't been doing its job for more than 30 years. But nevertheless, we have the laws that we have. The government's job is to enforce them, hopefully, with humanity, I add, in this moment, because obviously things are very different now. Yes, they are. I guess the other thing that's important is to understand. The border that we had in 2009, 2010, when President Obama was first in office, is not the border we have now. The biggest challenge was single adults coming from Mexico looking to evade our authorities and get into the U.S. and find work.

That's what our laws are built for. That's what our Border Patrol is built for. That's what the physical infrastructure at the border is built for. And in 2009, 2010, that's still what we had. What's happened since then is that we're not getting single individuals from Mexico. We're getting a crush of people who are coming to the United States to the U.S.-Mexico border and looking for the border patrol so that they can say, please let me in, I want asylum. And they're coming with children.

And that creates a whole different logistical challenge, a whole different humanitarian challenge. and a whole different set of legal challenges that we are not equipped for. So now let's go beyond President Obama. You co-wrote a piece in the Atlantic headlined how Democrats lost their way on immigration. And you described the period basically in the 2010s when the party leaves behind the Obama legacy.

I just want to read a couple sentences from that piece. How did Democrats fall so far and so quickly on immigration? It's easy to blame Trump and the lure of a xenophobic rhetoric. But we believe that immigration has become a losing issue for Democrats over the past decade because elected leaders have followed progressive advocates to the left beyond the political space available to them. So before we get into your critique, can you just describe how the Democratic Party's approach to immigration changed after President Obama left office? So President Obama comes into office with this balanced approach that I described. He does super generous things like DACA.

DACA is protecting the dreamers. 800,000 dreamers. But also is shifting how enforcement happens, but nevertheless enforcing the law in a visible way. And taking a lot of heat for it, right? Yeah. Also, he wins re-election. Wins re-election. But the Democratic political class is watching the yelling going on on the

about the enforcement side of the president's record. And that conversation is just they're removing a lot of people, and that is not okay with us. We're going to call him the deporter-in-chief, and we're angry. So fast forward to 2016, Secretary Clinton is very aware of the pressure on President Obama. She has a competitor running from her left. Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders. She tries to avoid the issue. and all of her rhetoric is focused on the generosity side, but she's not striking a balance. I've read every Democratic Party platform on immigration in the last 25 years. And in the 2016 platform, it's really interesting. Every mention of deportation is negative. Yeah. As in they shouldn't happen.

There's almost no discussion of actually enforcing immigration law. That's right. So Democrats are paying attention to the advocacy community. and the whole immigration advocacy infrastructure, and this is the world that I come from, is focused on immigration enforcement. And what they are asking their candidates to do is to make promises not to do it, which sounds awfully like an open borders approach. Now, I worked for what was then called the National Council of La Rasa. It's now called Unidos U.S. I was there for 20 years. We were accused of being open borders advocates all the time.

And that was incorrect. was not only was it not our position, it would never have been our position because an open border is not good policy if you care about working people in the United States. Right, particularly along the border. That's right. Along the border, but frankly, everywhere else. In fact, you know, I'm old enough to remember when the Wall Street Journal's editorial policy was for an open border because they thought it would depress wages in the United States. And many CEOs are still in favor of very high levels of immigration because they recognize that it can help hold wages down. Yeah, that's right. So now we're, you know, from sort of 2016 onward, we're in a moment where the advocacy community is sounding very much like the open borders advocates that we were trying very hard not to be. And then, of course, you get the Trump administration. And while the first Trump administration. And you and I are having this conversation in the second Trump administration where the parade of horribles has gotten unimaginably worse. But you and I also do remember what it was like.

like to watch families being separated and what it was like in the first Trump administration. It was beyond the pale, even in that moment. And so the advocacy community kind of doubles down, right? And so the scope of issues, which on the immigration issue that the left is focused on, shrinks to one issue, which is enforcement. And their demand becomes, don't do it. And that's, that. That, that, That is an untenable position, but unfortunately, Democrats ran towards it. You have that moment where the candidates in the presidential primary all raise their hands saying that they will support a proposal to decriminalize border crossing. In 2020.

If you be so kind, raise your hand if you think it should be a civil offense rather than a crime to cross a border without documentation. Can we keep the hands up so we could see them? I think there may have been one or two who didn't raise their hand, but almost all of them do. And I remember Joe Biden raises his hand in this kind of awkward, reluctant way. Right. You could almost see that he understood this was a bad idea, but he did it. He did do it. He also promised a moratorium on enforcement as president, and he sought to make good on that promise. So I want to be, I want to really be quite tough on the Biden administration here. And I'm curious whether you think any of this is too tough and unfair.

So you have President Biden take office, and he really implements a whole bunch of the policies that the activists have been calling for. As you just mentioned, there's a moratorium on deportations. He loosens rules around asylum and parole. I would in fact make sure that there is, we immediately surge to the border. All those people are seeking asylum. They deserve to be heard. That's who we are.

Where a nation says, if you want to flee and you're fleeing oppression, you should come. What happens, we have an incredible surge of immigration during his presidency, a record surge. And what I have often heard from people in the Biden administration and from activists is they basically claimed, no, that was a coincidence. It was because of COVID. It was because of Venezuela. It was because of this. And I just think they're fundamentally wrong.

I know that COVID and Venezuela did drive immigration up. But we had bad things happen in previous decades. We had the Mexican peso crisis. We had the Vietnam War. And to me, it's strange that many activists and Democrats who pushed for immigration policy to be more open, when they then got the policy outcome they were pushing for, which was more, more, more. They claim, oh, that's just a coincidence. So I think there is a fair amount of truth in what you say, but I don't think it's completely fair. because the situation that President Biden finds himself in when he becomes president is a completely transformed border.

So the Mexican peso crisis pales in comparison. The scale of what he faced was not just what was happening in Venezuela, but a confluence of things that includes the fact that the smuggling networks, starting from about 2014, become incredibly sophisticated. and they start specifically exploiting flaws in our asylum policy and specifically marketing to people, you've got to come, give me the money now, because this is the moment to come. And you get a scale unlike anything the country has seen before at the border. And so in that sense, whatever policy formulation

you try to make for what was business as usual is not going to work because the scale is just different. the way the dairy and gap that this part of the jungle that people are walking through becomes well traversed with infrastructure helping people get across. All of that is new. And those were the right things to say and the right policies to reverse. So they did not send an unequivocal. The doors open. Everybody come message.

And they were faced with an unprecedented wave. But then I think it took too long, and I think this was because of pressure from the advocacy community, too long to get to the policy that they ultimately got to. By the end of the Biden administration, they were managing the border actually quite well and quite effectively. But by that time, it was pretty late in the game and they weren't able to persuade the country that they had accomplished what they in fact had accomplished. And I'm sure some of our listeners were thinking, but wait, President Biden tried to pass this bill through Congress, that would have increased border security and Donald Trump out of office cynically told Republicans to oppose it and killed it. All that's true.

I think what your point also underlines, though, is that President Biden didn't try very hard to secure the border until very late in his presidency. So I think it's not that they didn't try. It's that they were reluctant, I think, to be too forceful and too visible too soon because of the pressure from the advocacy community because of the theory that, you know, you lose the Latino vote if you're too forceful on this, which is true only to a point. And I think one of the things I would fault President Biden on, and this is a person I've worked with and appreciate greatly, is that he really didn't want to talk about this issue. And his advisors really didn't want to talk about the issue.

And they adopted the theory that any day that you're talking about immigration is a day you're not talking about the economy and therefore you've lost that day. And I think that was a really, really harmful mistake. How should we think about the fact that several of the Biden policies were going beyond what Congress had passed, it seemed, and he certainly was going beyond public opinion? I actually think President Biden doesn't get enough credit for some of the creative things that his administration did to try to stem the tide at the border, to keep things more under control. Temporary protected status is an example of that. It essentially prevents you from removing people to countries that are dangerous. But in a controlled way, and it gives people work authorization so that they can fend for themselves.

And he did that for Venezuela and for Haiti. That's right. And when Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukrainians started showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border because it was the only way in, they decided to use humanitarian visas. but they did a very smart thing. They said, we will make humanitarian visas available to people from Ukraine if there is someone in the U.S. who will sponsor them. And hundreds of thousands of Americans stepped up

and sponsored people from Ukraine, which means that instead of something that feels like an onslaught of people, what you got was something Americans mostly didn't notice, which is Ukrainians arriving at the airport and someone picks them up, who has figured out their housing, who's helping them find jobs, helping enroll. older kids in school. That was so successful. First of all, Ukrainian stopped coming to the U.S. Mexico border. And their arrival to the United States was seamless. The Biden administration

ran the same play again for people from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and thousands of Americans step forward to sponsor those people. That happened almost without notice because it happened so smoothly. What that tells you is that even in this moment, we are more generous than we know, we are able to provide a welcome and that we can have an orderly process even in a time of chaos. So let me try to summarize. So with President Biden, we have an immigration policy that is too lax. The laxness of their policy helps contribute to this huge surge, and voters really don't like it. And it becomes a great issue for Donald Trump in the 2024 campaign. And now President Trump is just putting in place these horrific immigration policies.

He's sending people to foreign prisons without any due process. He's locking up people who are not citizens in inhumane ways. And some people who are citizens, by the way. And some people who are citizens in inhumane ways. And so the list of ways in which Trump's immigration policy is truly horrible is long. And when you look at polling, you see that Americans don't like his immigration policy. However, polling also shows pretty consistently that voters still trust Republicans more on immigration than Democrats. And so that brings us to what the country's next story about immigration should be.

And so what are the first principles for what kind of vision we can have for immigration? for those of us who believe this is a nation of immigrants, who very much want us to get beyond this Trump era, and also understand that where the Democratic Party was on immigration was the wrong place. How do we get to something better? So the reason that this is the strongest issue for President Trump is that what his, the really horrible stuff he's doing,

and I could go on and on about that, is the only thing on the menu. Right? So the American public is not comfortable with the way that he is enforcing the law, with the way that he's treating immigrants themselves. But they don't see an alternative anywhere. So what I have been arguing is that Democrats need to step up again and lean into the issue rather than run away from the issue. We can once again be the party that proposes solutions. And there are solutions at hand.

This is not an intractable problem. There's a way to have what we most need in the United States, which is, frankly, a generous immigration policy with lots of pathways for legal entry and very, very limited pathways for people who approach our border and need protection. That is something that is absolutely achievable. And some of the best evidence we have for that, frankly, is what happened at the end of the Biden administration. They demonstrated that it's possible to limit the number of people who come in asking for asylum. And it's pretty clear that you can adjudicate their petitions relatively quickly so that you can get to an answer. If someone comes and says, I fear being sent back to my country, you can get them an answer relatively quickly. If the answer is yes, then they get legal status.

They can work and they go on their ways. And if the answer is no, you can humanely remove them. And I think that that's an important point because I think there are good-hearted immigration advocates who view any deportation as inhumane. That's right. But if we stop doing any deportation, we're not a nation of laws and we don't have a border. That's right. And if we're going to deport people, the humane way to do it is quickly. First of all, I completely agree with that.

But it is also true that we, you and I, all of us in the United States, have been complicit for decades and decades and decades in a system that, says in public, we don't want you to come, but the economy kind of says, actually, we really do. We don't want you to come, but we'll employ you. But yeah, but if you take all the risk yourself and survive it all, we really, really need you at the nursing home, at the hotel, at the restaurant, teaching school, becoming a lawyer, becoming a doctor, whatever it is. And so that's been the status quo for the whole time I've been doing this, and I started in the 80s. And so we deserve a better system than that. And frankly, so do the immigrants who assume all of the risk to make lives in the United States that we depend on. But if we were starting fresh, right, with a next president, you know, God willing, I would say you need a set of policies at the border which tighten way down on how our asylum system works, this notion that right now you can come and you don't get a hearing for,

seven years and in the meantime, you just, you wait in the United States, is that's untenable. And then we really do have to acknowledge that we've been living with a broken system for decades and create pathways for the people who are already here. We know even now in this moment that the majority of the public supports a pathway for somebody who's been here, five years, 10 years, 20 years, raise their kids as otherwise law-abiding. There is real horror that these are people who are literally being tackled on the streets by masked federal agents. We could do way better than that.

And so it's mixing this idea of, look, we are going to enforce our laws. We're going to enforce them at the border. And we are going to lean into this idea that we are a nation of immigrants. It's a glorious history. It's a competitive advantage with the rest of the world. And by the way, we're an aging society. And if we want to have a well-functioning economy of people who are teaching our kids in preschools and taking care of our parents, we need to.

be welcoming. David, the best antidote to illegal immigration is legal immigration. When you think about the conversation that we're having about the crisis in caregiving, right, as baby boomers age, the crisis in child care, which we can all, anybody with young kids can see, immigration is part of the answer to that. It's not the only answer. And you can't do it in an unlimited way because you need to both raise wages in those professions as well as make sure we have enough people to do them. is all achievable. Do you see any prospect for a meaningful part of the Republican Party to be able to agree to something that has balance? I mean, it isn't just Trump, although he's moved it in such a darker place.

As we've talked about, before he was president, it was House Republicans who defeated comprehensive immigration reform under President Biden. So how possibly do we get to a situation where even if we have a Democratic president in Congress, Republicans aren't essentially blocking it? Well, that's the big question because the reason we haven't had immigration reform over many decades is because Republicans have blocked it at every turn. That's just true. Obviously, it can't happen while Republicans are in the thrall of this president. And that is to the detriment of the United States, honestly. So, look, I think as an American public, we have to demand answers rather than demagoguery. We have to demand solutions.

And my plea to Democratic legislators and candidates is to be the people offering them. We're a nation of laws as well as a nation of immigrants. That's what President Obama used to say, and he's right. We have to get the law right. The fact that the law is badly broken, however, is not an excuse to make an argument that we should just not enforce the law at all. We need a balanced approach, and immigrants are being hurt because we don't have one. Another politician whom you worked very closely with was the late Senator Ted Kennedy. His family, I think many people don't even realize this today, really changed.

the politics of immigration in this country. His brother, as president, pushed for immigration reform. Ted Kennedy was the person in the Senate as an impossibly young senator. The first bill he pushed in the Senate was the bill that became the 1965 immigration law that got rid of our racist old immigration laws. And when you worked in the Obama White House, you kept a letter from him framed in your office to you and it said, we didn't complete the journey, but we'll get there. He was referring to a failed effort to pass immigration reform.

We didn't complete the journey, but we'll get there. Do you still believe that? I do. I do. Even now, I still have faith in this country. This is a very hard time. I am so fearful for what we are becoming, but we don't have to become that. And I don't, I take some courage from the fact that most of the country,

doesn't like what they're seeing. But that by itself is not enough to get us somewhere else. The one small reason to me for optimism is we've overcome worse things. But this is a darker period than I ever expected to live in in this country until relatively recently. Yeah. And it seems to me that it is really important to get the balance right of both calling out just how alarming this is. Yes. and giving people an alternative that can rally them and inspire them and get us to a different place.

Exactly. And that is eminently achievable. It's not always comfortable, right? The conversation about immigration enforcement is not a comfortable conversation. It's really not a comfortable conversation in the Latino community. But I'll tell you what, people with names like mine are carrying passports right now in the United States in order to go about our business in our own country. That is as dark a time as you can have. We have to address that, but we can't address it just by objecting, although we have to object forcefully. We have to address it by fixing the issue that this president is exploiting in order to undercut our democracy. Cecilia Munoz, thank you so much.

Thank you. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Bashaka, Darba, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzik. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro,

and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amon Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.