The Biden government recommends Ken Salazar, a former senator and secretary of the interior, serve as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: President Biden is close to appointing a leading ambassador. If he is considering a former colleague of the Senate of Mexico City, he acknowledges that the crisis at the border will require diplomatic and political skills to resolve.
Send the news: Biden has started calling some of its potential ambassadors to offer foreign jobs.
- The person familiar with the matter told Axios that the process is at an early stage and not everyone who will eventually get an ambassador has been contacted.
- “The president has not made the decision on the vast majority of his appointments as ambassador,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.
Go deeper: Describing himself as a 12th-generation boy from the southwest, Salazar was elected to the Senate in 2004 and resigned as president to become President Obama’s Home Secretary.
- When he left the Department of Home Affairs in 2013, he joined the international law firm WilmerHale, where he still practices.
- During the campaign, the 66-year-old served as co-chair of Biden’s Latino leadership committee.
The whole picture: In terms of immigration, Biden takes a different approach than President Trump, both to the border itself and to the relationship with the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico.
- Trump threatened López Obrador with closing Mexico’s northern border to the United States and demanded that Mexico deploy forces to its southern border to prevent Central American migrants from traveling through Mexico en route to the US
- Trump and López Obrador have finally agreed to the Migrant Protection Protocols, which require asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their applications are processed in the US.
In one of his first presidential appearances, Biden suspended the MPP and tried to strike a different tone with the Mexican government.
- López Obrador blamed Biden’s border crisis: “Expectations were created that there would be better treatment of migrants with President Biden’s government,” he said last month.
- “It caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, to cross the border and thought it was easier to do so.”
- Biden continued to use a Trump-era public health order to quickly return to Mexico-migrating adults and some families trying to cross the border.
Flash back: President Obama’s last ambassador to Mexico, Roberta Jacobson, has retired to serve as Biden’s border expert.
- She announced last week that she would be leaving her post in the coming days.