The Clowns Who Broke the Border Now Want to Lecture You About ICE

Their names are Blas Nuñez-Neto and Adam Jentleson, Democrats in the wilderness pretending to be insiders.

COLUMN — The memo landed on desks around Washington this week like a ransom note written in disappearing ink. It came from something called the Searchlight Institute, which is what happens when you give hedge fund money to Senate staffers who’ve never met a losing strategy they couldn’t monetize.

The subject: Democrats should stop saying “Abolish ICE.”

The author: Blas Nuñez-Neto, who spent three years as Biden’s border policy chief watching ten million people cross the southern border while insisting everything was “orderly.”

You can’t make this up. The man who presided over the greatest immigration policy collapse in modern American history now wants to give you advice on how to think about immigration enforcement. It’s like getting fire safety tips from the Hindenburg pilot after the crash.

Here’s what Nuñez-Neto won’t tell you in his tidy little memo: While he was sitting in his West Wing office designing the CBP One app—which worked about as well as a screen door on a submarine—ICE agent Jonathan Ross was loading his service weapon. On January 7, Ross put three bullets into Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old heroic citizen and mother of three, on a Minneapolis street corner. Chest, forearm, head. She died at the hospital an hour later.

That’s what ICE does when nobody’s watching. That’s what happens when you build a deportation machine and then act surprised when it starts eating American citizens.

But Nuñez-Neto doesn’t want to talk about Renee Good. He wants to talk about “pragmatic reform” and “orderly pathways.” He wants to explain why 80% of Democrats—who now support abolishing ICE—are being emotional and impractical.

This is the same genius who eliminated the requirement for Border Patrol agents to ask migrants if they fear returning home before deporting them. You read that right. For 30 years, it was standard practice to ask people, “Are you afraid to go back?” Nuñez-Neto decided that was too much paperwork. Now asylum seekers have to spontaneously announce their fear in English to agents who’ve been trained to say “there is no asylum anymore.”

The Houston Asylum Office—which Nuñez-Neto’s DHS kept using despite its documented record of wrongly rejecting legitimate claims—processed a Mexican woman who’d miscarried from domestic violence beatings. Not good enough, they said. Deported. A year later, she’s still hiding in Honduras, trying to find a way back to safety.

But sure, tell us more about how Democrats are being too radical.

THE SEARCHLIGHT THAT COULDN’T SEE THE WALL

The real joke is where Nuñez-Neto ended up: the Searchlight Institute, a $10 million-a-year “think tank” founded by Adam Jentleson, another Washington lifer who’s made a career out of being wrong in expensive offices.

Jentleson spent 2021 and 2022 running Battle Born Collective, pushing Democrats to eliminate the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation. How’d that work out? Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema told him to pound sand, nothing passed, and Jentleson moved on to his next gig: telling John Fetterman how too be a senator. LOL.

That’s right. Jentleson was Fetterman’s chief of staff for exactly long enough to write a tell-all to New York Magazine claiming the Senator had stopped taking his medication and was having “erratic moods.” Fetterman’s office says the whole thing was fabricated, that Jentleson made it up to create distance before launching his billionaire-funded think tank. The doctor Jentleson claimed he emailed about Fetterman’s health? No record of any email.

But Jentleson needed a soft landing, and three rich guys—a hedge fund manager, a real estate investor, and a venture capitalist—gave him ten million dollars to set up shop in a Beltway office and tell Democrats what they already wanted to hear: that they should stop listening to their own voters.

The Searchlight Institute’s big policy contribution so far? A memo saying Democrats should stop talking about climate change because it gives people “bad vibes.” Their solution to the greatest existential threat facing humanity? Don’t mention it. Just talk about cheap energy and hope nobody notices the planet is on fire.

This is the intellectual firepower Nuñez-Neto joined. This is the “searchlight” that’s supposed to illuminate the path forward.

HOMELAND SECURITY REMEMBERS BLAS

Here’s what Nuñez-Neto’s former colleagues at DHS think of his newfound wisdom. When he published his memo, someone at the Department of Homeland Security posted this on social media: “I was Humpty Dumpty. Here’s how to sit on a wall.” LOL.

That’s not a disagreement. That’s a public execution.

The people who wore the uniform, who processed the claims, who dealt with the consequences of his “wait and see” strategy while cities buckled under the weight—they remember. They remember the CBP One app that crashed constantly. They remember the legal gymnastics that made sure nobody could actually seek asylum. They remember admitting to The New York Times, months after leaving office, that yeah, maybe there was a crisis after all.

By then, it was too late. The President had lost the public’s trust. The border cities had been overwhelmed. And ICE—the agency Nuñez-Neto now wants to defend—had been given free rein to operate like an occupying army in American neighborhoods.

SEVENTY-NINE PERCENT

Here’s the number that haunts Nuñez-Neto’s memo: 79% of registered Democrats now support abolishing ICE. Not reforming it. Not restraining it. Abolishing it entirely.

That’s not a fringe position anymore. That’s a supermajority of the Democratic base.

They watched ICE deploy 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis. They watched checkpoints go up near schools. They watched Renee Good die on camera. They watched their own party’s administration—the one Nuñez-Neto served—implement Trump-style asylum bans that progressive groups called “disgraceful,” “unconscionable,” and “disastrous.”

And now Nuñez-Neto wants them to calm down and be reasonable about the agency that just killed an American citizen in broad daylight.

The Searchlight Institute can publish all the memos it wants. It’s a free country, sort of. Searchlight billionaire donors can buy all the office space on Capitol Hill they can afford. Adam Jentleson can keep telling establishment Democrats that the problem is their voters care too much about the right things.

But the voters know what they saw. They know who was in charge when it all fell apart. And they know that the last people they should take advice from are the guys who broke the watch and are now trying to sell them a map to find the time.

Renee Nicole Good is dead. ICE put her in the ground. And the man who spent three years ensuring that agency faced no meaningful accountability now wants to explain why abolishing it is impractical.

That’s not a searchlight. That’s a hall of mirrors built by con men who think you’re too stupid to remember what they did.

The people in the streets remember. The 79% remember. And no amount of hedge fund money is going to make them forget.