Former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar talks about the border, trade, and a possible run for governor of Colorado
Two months after stepping down as the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, former U.S. senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar took part in his first television interview since those events.
He spoke candidly with CBS Colorado about what went wrong at the United States southern border, saying it was a failure of leadership by the White House and Congress, "I saw it firsthand. I spent more time on the border than any other single U.S. high-level official on the Mexico side and on the U.S. side. I went to the sites of migrants who died on the trail right on the Guatemalan border - the mothers and babies who were dying because we have such a dysfunctional system.
He said he spoke to the Biden Administration repeatedly about what needed to happen, "What should have happened is what happened in the last year of the administration and that was the proclamation that said if you're going to apply for refugee status, you need to apply in your country of origin. But it came too late in the game. It should have come as I recommended years before because that would have closed down the flow of migrants at our border and created a humane way of dealing with people applying for refugee status."
Salazar said he also went to Congress begging leadership on both sides of the aisle for help securing a strip of land along the Mexico-Guatemalan border where the migrants were entering, "Because it would be much easier to control migration flows, illicit activities like drugs, across 180 miles of jungle where there are few places they can cross than it is across a 2 thousand mile border of desert. With few exceptions, there was not a lot of interest in trying to solve the problem."
Even as the border crisis worsened, the trade relationship between the U.S. and Mexico flourished.
"We became the number one trading partners in the history of the world," said Salazar.
The partnership is now in jeopardy as President Donald Trump threatens a trade war with Mexico. In 2023, Colorado exported $1.6 billion in goods to Mexico and imported $1.2 billion.
Salazar said our loss would be China's gain, "China is everywhere in Latin America and China is everywhere in Mexico and they're competing hard whether it's for cars, whether it's for pharmaceuticals, for a whole host of things."
Our economy and our security, he said, depends on an integrated North America, which is the subject of a book he's working on, "We have to address challenges - whether it's fentanyl or guns or cartels or trade - we have to do it together. We're one family in this North American continent."
Salazar is also managing his family's ranch in the San Luis Valley, spending time with family, and mulling what's next.
He isn't ruling out a run for governor, saying he's a "common sense democrat" who represents those who have been left behind including Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, women, and rural Coloradans. "If you have a heart attack or you have a problem in rural Colorado, you have a much greater chance of dying and I've seen that first hand. If you want to get a job, you can't stay in rural Colorado because there aren't the jobs you need. And so, we need to fight for rural Colorado, and we need to fight for rural America and I'm going to be speaking out on those issues regardless of whether I run for whatever office I might run for."
"My North Star has not changed nor has my passion and my gratitude for the people of Colorado because the people of Colorado gave me a chance when no one else frankly thought I could win but the people of Colorado did it - for attorney general once, attorney general twice, and U.S. Senator - and so I am forever grateful to this great state and the people."
