I'll have to strongly disagree with you regarding Janet Napolitano. She was our governor at one point in time. And not a very good one.
When she became Secretary, she stated with no hesitation that "the border has never been more secure". It wasn't. Shortly after the murder of Brian Terry in an ambush in Madera Canyon, she flew down to Tucson and ordered the agents in the Tucson and Yuma sectors there would be no discussion about the case nor any discussion about what was happening along the border.
BP buddies of mine advised me to stay away from areas where I liked to hunt. They had become literal war zones. The Vekol Valley might as well have referred to as the Swat Valley. They had zero respect for her.
Oh, as a reminder, it was Alejandro Mayorkas, who at the time worked for her at DHS, who wrote what is now known as DACA.
Tom Ridge....damn....I forgot about him. Absolutely outstanding
There is an elephant to not ignore that more often than not - members in officers of particular communities(unless they are coconuts or white chocolate) on occasion seem to be biased in providing treatment to their ethnicity. Part of it is because they likely came into office due to that vote/factor etc but also because they have affinity or history with that society.
This bias operated even against case merits, as seen when she silenced agents after Brian Terry's murder, protecting a policy framework that her community ties helped sustain.
The colonial delineation of border states amplifies this pattern. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California emerged from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Gadsden Purchase as hybrid zones where Hispanic populations held demographic weight. Elected officials from these areas, often rising through ethnic vote blocs, face structural incentives to tilt enforcement. Napolitano's career trajectory fits this pattern because her gubernatorial win leaned on border-state demographics, and at DHS, she advanced measures like workforce reallocation that softened interior enforcement, benefiting communities with historical claims to the region. Alejandro Mayorkas, her deputy who authored DACA, extended this logic, embedding protections that mirrored the same affinities.
But if we go further back on the reasons for this border deluge - Urban white flight to education and coastal elites created the vacuum. As "Dicks or Karens" shunned low-wage janitorial roles, migrant labor filled essential gaps in border economies, deepening political dependence on lax policies. Napolitano's leadership did not buck this; it embodied it, with resource cuts to Border Patrol amid Vekol Valley chaos while expanding administrative discretion for ethnic kin. Data from that era shows enforcement hours plummeted in her sectors, not from incompetence alone but from a measured bias favoring one group's mobility over another's security.
Even aggressive deportation drives under the current administration will fail to resolve the border state's entrenched ethnic affinities and labor dependencies.
Even aggressive deportation drives under the current administration will fail to resolve the border state's entrenched ethnic affinities and labor dependencies. The "Gestapo approach" of mass roundups and interior enforcement shocks the system but ignores how deeply migrant networks sustain essential services from janitorial work to agriculture in Arizona and Texas. White America, lulled by right-wing narratives of self-reliance and "taking back jobs," remains deluded about its own workforce gaps. Coastal professionals and suburban families shun these roles. Even poor whites in poverty dodge the grind.
Why? History carved that path. Post-WWII unions and New Deal policies locked blue-collar whites into steady factory jobs with benefits. Democrats built that cradle. Then came the 1970s. Stagflation hit. Reagan's GOP crushed unions, deregulated, and cheered offshoring to China. Factories vanished. Good gigs turned to gig economy scraps. Blue-collar whites feel jobless because political betrayal gutted their world. Dems went coastal elite. GOP peddled culture war glitter over retraining funds. No one rebuilt the ladder. Economies stay hooked on the labor deportations aim to expel. Skyrocketing costs follow. Food prices leap. Houses rot. Services vanish. Voters who cheered the crackdown pay first.
This is all a marketed fantasy where rugged individualism magically fills labor voids. Decades of offshoring and "dirty job" disdain hollowed native willingness. Poor whites lack numbers or stomach for fields, packing plants, or elder care. Pride stings too. They scrape by on aid rather than pick crops. Political forces enabled this split. Unions died under Reaganomics. Trade deals like NAFTA shipped jobs south. Dems chased Silicon Valley. GOP riled grievances without solutions. Blue-collar whites lost stable paths. Now they game safety nets from Appalachia to the Ozarks.