Ken Salazar has a plan for the U.S. and all of North America to reverse policies that he believes are harming families, communities, states and the nation.
The former Colorado attorney general, U.S. senator, Interior secretary and ambassador to Mexico writes about the plan and the impact of family and growing up in southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley on his career in his book “Borderlands: My Fight for an Inclusive America.”
The book, scheduled for release July 28, is part memoir, charting his journey from a ranching area, home to his family for several generations, to the upper levels of political power in Colorado and the federal government.
“Borderlands” is also Salazar’s proposed map for charting a path out of what he said is the country’s “greatest division in my lifetime.” He blames President Donald Trump for the division and denounces what he calls Trump’s “project of erasure”: the dismantling of diversity, inclusion and norms that constrained his modern-era predecessors.
The 71-year-old proposes an alternative, a “New American Alliance” among the U.S., Canada and Mexico to build a “unified economic and democratic powerhouse.”
The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.
While Salazar criticizes Trump for vilifying immigrants to grab and hold onto power, he doesn’t let his fellow Democrats off the hook. He vents frustration with the Biden administration for not responding sooner to the growing groups of people crossing the border with Mexico and for not appointing a migration “czar” that he advocated for.
Salazar said Trump was right when he called the southern border broken. Thousands of people a day were crossing into the U.S., far beyond what Customers and Border Protection was meant to handle.
“We criticize Donald Trump as unfit for office, which I think is accurate. But you’ve got to move beyond that to really create the vision and the solutions for the future,” Salazar said in an interview with The Denver Post.
He hopes Democrats have learned that people’s concerns about a safe, secure border need to be addressed. “You don’t solve the crisis by simply calling it something else or walking away from it.”
Dick Wadhams, former state Republican chairman and longtime political strategist for GOP candidates, said he couldn’t see Salazar agreeing with the Biden administration’s policies on the border.
“Ken Salazar, I always thought, was a very smart political guy and that he could see that the nation was not in favor of essentially an open border,” Wadhams said. “And second, that’s just not the right way to have a border. A nation has to have a secure border.”
Immigration reform, long stymied in Congress, was needed, including changes in asylum laws, Salazar wrote in his book. Migrants reaching the border could claim asylum and wait to go to court, which could take months or even years.
“This surge turned an existing crisis into what I can only call an emergency. Eleven months before the US election, it had the potential to be politically devastating for President Biden,” Salazar wrote. “But even more than that, it was a human catastrophe on an industrial scale.”
Salazar said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, as many call him, grew frustrated with a lack of movement by the U.S. to modernize facilities on its side of the border as Mexico had. Salazar was vexed by a drop in Mexico’s repatriation flights and efforts to relocate migrants from the border.
Vice President Kamala Harris was tasked with getting at the “root causes” of the migration problem by concentrating on poverty and corruption in places such as Guatemala and Honduras. But Salazar wrote the effort “was having no effect on migration flows.”
However, the border wasn’t open as Republicans claimed, Salazar said. Including the COVID-related expulsions, former President Joe Biden had deported about 3.6 million migrants, more than the 2 million Trump deported during his entire first term, Salazar wrote.
Biden issued an executive order on asylum restrictions. The number of crossings began dropping almost immediately and continued to decline, Salazar said.
And a bipartisan immigration reform bill introduced in the Senate looked like it might pass, but failed 50-49 in February 2024 after Trump, then a private citizen, intervened.
“He needed the chaos, the human suffering, the political vulnerability it created for President Biden and congressional Democrats,” Salazar wrote.
Immigration is seen as a major factor in Trump winning a second term. were among Trump’s promises in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“There were a lot of issues. You could point to Biden hanging on too long, inflation,” said Robert Preuhs, a professor and head of the political science department at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
“But immigration was one of those sets of important issues that arose right around that time. It has been a growing concern and it was certainly an impetus for voting for Trump, particularly among Republicans,” Preuhs said.
Slight majorities and in some cases pluralities of Americans support more border security, a legal framework for immigration and see diversity, particularly from immigration, as beneficial to the U.S., Preuhs said.
“The difficulty is that there are slices of each party that reject particular points of those,” Preuhs said. “I think polarization is still the overriding context in the midterms and likely in 2028.”
Salazar: Not identity politics, unity agenda
Salazar wants to defuse the polarization he sees as a threat to the country’s democratic principles. On immigration, he supports pathways to legalization for the “Dreamers,” who were brought to the U.S. as children, and others in the U.S. illegally. He said criteria must be established and the people would have to be “good actors.”
As a Senator, he worked on bipartisan legislation that offered immigrants an opportunity to become citizens. The requirements included background checks, payment of back taxes, learning English and starting the naturalization process at the “back of the line.”
There are 10 million to 12 million people living in the shadows and mass deportations of them don’t make sense, Salazar said.
“You’re going to have an economy that breaks if you deport them. Whether it’s homeowners who have landscaping needs, or contractors, or dairy farms, or slaughterhouses, they’re going to be hurting more than they’re hurting today,” Salazar said.
Families in Colorado and across the country are living in fear of parents being deported and children being left behind, he said.
Under Trump, diversity, what Salazar calls America’s “superpower,” is under siege, Salazar said. As Interior Secretary in the Obama administration, Salazar said the department worked to diversify the ranks of employees and tell the stories of all Americans.
“Some would call this ‘identity politics,’ but I’ve always called it a unity agenda,” Salazar wrote.
He grew up on a ranch in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado on land his family has owned since before Colorado became a state. His family’s roots in the Southwest go back four centuries.
Mexican Americans throughout the region “became U.S. citizens of this country not by choice but by conquest when, in 1848, the United States won a bloody two-year conflict it had waged against Mexico,” Salazar wrote.
The differences in people’s backgrounds and beliefs that the Trump administration deems unimportant are the country’s strengths and protecting them is part of the march toward a more perfect union, Salazar said.
“I can’t stand on the sidelines and just watch everything that I’ve worked for in my life basically be undone by this president and his administration,” Salazar said.
He wrote that he was fortunate to have been raised “with the hallmark values of faith, family, and community, and to have had exceptional mentors throughout my life.” He said they taught him to fight for a diverse and inclusive society.
“And now is the time to fight,” Salazar added.
He believes his New American Alliance proposal gives Democrats something to fight for. The relationship with Mexico and Canada would focus on such areas as trade; national security; maintaining security along borders; migration; crime; defense; energy; and climate change.
Salazar has talked to national politicians, think tanks and business organizations about his plan. He wants to see the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement be renewed. Tariffs imposed by the Trump administration have strained relations among the neighbors.
“I think what I have posed is something that the Democrats should embrace, as well as Republicans. It’s a good program for America, for security, for the economy,” Salazar said.
Asked if he is considering promotion of the alliance as a lead-up to a run for the White House, Salazar said for now, he’s taking his granddaughter’s advice.
“Mireya, my granddaughter, always tells me, ‘One thing at a time.’ Right now the message is about the borderlands, the platform for the borderlands,” Salazar said.
After his time as ambassador to Mexico ended, Salazar said he thought about running for Colorado governor. But in 2025, he had started work on his book and thought he could accomplish more by pursuing what he refers to as his “borderlands” agenda.
After Biden struggled in his debate with Trump in July 2024 and sentiment grew that he should drop out of the race, Salazar wrote that he considered running for president on a “Make America United Again” campaign.
Salazar’s plans ended when Biden halted his campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris.
“If there were no primaries and he was the candidate, I think a Ken Salazar campaign would have a lot of potential,” Preuhs, the MSU-Denver professor said. “I do think it’s important to have a senior statesman, particularly a moderate, but also a Latino, making these arguments for the importance of diversity.”
But there are already up to a dozen viable Democratic presidential candidates, some well-known, Preuhs said. And it’s unclear whether the party will rally behind a moderate or back a more progressive candidate.
“I think a lot of it depends on how well moderates do in some of these swing districts this year,” he added.
Political consultant Wadhams said if Biden had not sought a second term and if a competitive nomination process had been held, Salazar could have played an interesting role in the election.
“Now, would he have won the nomination? I don’t know, because I think maybe he is in some ways too, interestingly enough, conservative for today’s Democratic Party,” Wadhams said.
The two political parties are operating from the extremes, he added. The Democratic Party is heavily influenced by the Democratic Socialists, while the “MAGA, stolen-election conspiracists run the Republican Party,” Wadhams said.
Part of what makes Salazar different from other Democrats is his rural background, Wadhams said. When Republican Bill Owens was elected governor in 1998, Salazar, who was elected as attorney general, was the only Democrat to win statewide office. Salazar invited Wadhams, Owens’ press secretary, to breakfast to get to know him.
“What it really drove home for me that day was that our backgrounds were so similar,” said Wadhams, who grew up in the Arkansas Valley, east of the San Luis Valley.
“We were kind of chuckling that we both had to feed livestock before we went to school every day,” Wadhams said. “We both grew up on irrigated farms. We talked about spending our summers stacking hay and irrigating crops.
“I don’t think you can underestimate his family background, where he grew up and how he grew up and how that’s affected his political persona,” Wadhams said.
For the time being, the politics Salazar is focused on is his idea for a North American alliance. He also splits time between being with his family in Denver and working on the family ranch near Manassa in the San Luis Valley, which sits between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains.
He also intends to stay engaged in public affairs no matter what. “I have more public purpose left in me.”
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