The author of a controversial memo telling Democrats to abandon the slogan “Abolish ICE” and instead focus on reform and retraining is a former Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection official who for the last seven months has worked for WestExec Advisors, a secretive Washington, D.C., shadow lobbyist that counts as clients major government contractors in the defense and surveillance industry.
In an interview with the Prospect, Blas Nuñez-Neto would not say who his clients are at WestExec Advisors, where he is a senior adviser, only that he has consulted in recent years on immigration, customs, and trade. He said casting his memo as serving the interests of those clients would be “a little disingenuous,” while again declining to say who those clients are.
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WestExec does not disclose its client list, though the Prospect, The Intercept, and the Revolving Door Project have for years reported that the firm helps tech startups and defense companies get contracts with the U.S. government, though it is not required to register as a lobbyist. Nuñez-Neto’s statement that he has consulted on immigration issues suggests that WestExec is squarely involved at the nexus of militarization and surveillance-state activities by U.S. immigration enforcement agencies.
Some of WestExec’s clients are listed in congressional testimony, press releases, and other documents. President Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines, for example, said during her confirmation hearings that she had worked for WestExec for three years, and that her clients were Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Open Philanthropy. She also said that she didn’t have access to the firm’s entire client list, a claim that other employees of the firm also make.
WestExec has multiple defense industry clients, including the Israeli surveillance company Windward, as the Prospect reported. WestExec helped Google work with the Defense Department for AI drone warfare and advised defense industry contractors Boeing and McKinsey, as well as asset management firm Pine Island Capital Partners, which invests in the aerospace and defense industries. Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt hired WestExec through his foundation, Schmidt Futures.
WestExec advised Palantir, until the software giant, along with others, fired the firm after President Trump won re-election. Palantir has worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since at least 2013, supplying the agency with case management and pattern-matching tools. Recently, it created a data-mining software platform called ImmigrationOS to find and track people suspected of being noncitizens. The contract is reportedly valued at $30 million.
NUÑEZ-NETO TOLD THE PROSPECT that he wrote the memo in his capacity as a senior fellow at Searchlight Institute, an organization launched last fall to pull Democrats to the right, because he’s concerned that saying “Abolish ICE” will alienate voters.
“I understand the anger that a lot of people feel when confronted with some of the excesses we’ve seen from the Trump administration, including the brutal killing of Renee Good last week,” Nuñez-Neto told the Prospect, referring to the legal observer in Minneapolis whom ICE agent Jonathan Ross executed with four bullets, including to the face.
A day after Ross shot Good, an immigration agent shot and injured Luis David Nino-Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras in Portland, Oregon. Agents then shot and wounded a second person in Minnesota.
A majority of registered voters told Quinnipiac University pollsters that shooting Good was not justified, with over 9 in 10 Democrats and 6 in 10 independents saying so. Nearly 60 percent of voters said they disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws. A separate Economist/YouGov poll out this week showed slight plurality support for abolishing ICE, including 45-35 support from self-described moderates.
“‘Abolish ICE’ is not just the wrong messaging, [it is] the wrong messaging and the wrong policy,” Nuñez-Neto said. “We’re always going to need an agency that enforces our immigration laws in the interior of the U.S. We’re never going to have no illegal immigration, there will always be people that need to be removed, we need to have an agency to do that.”
Nuñez-Neto acknowledged that those who say “Abolish ICE” aren’t saying the U.S. should cease immigration enforcement, but that he believes that’s what most other people think. “The slogan … suggests we are going to stop enforcing the immigration laws,” he said.
To win over moderates, Nuñez-Neto believes Democrats should say they want ICE to be “reformed, modernized, and professionalized,” with better training and more oversight, such as via a bipartisan group of law professionals to overhaul and approve ICE and Customs and Border Protection use-of-force policies.
“People want enforcement but they don’t want cruelty,” Nuñez-Neto said of ICE, whose agents are hunting people door-to-door in Minnesota and who receive challenge coins stamped with a skull that looks like the Nazi Totenkopf. “Let’s not abolish ICE. Let’s abolish the cruelty.”
Nuñez-Neto placed some of the blame on a lack of training of ICE field personnel. “I think that one of the reasons we are seeing a lot of these egregious instances where use of force is being misapplied, where agencies are using use-of-force tactics … is because this administration is putting officers and agents that have not been trained about how to interact with the public, who have not been trained on crowd control, into situations where they are confronting crowds that are angry.” (Ross, the agent who shot Good four times, was a National Guard soldier who deployed to Iraq, and who had 20 years of experience.)
Democrats could talk about replacing ICE with another agency, Nuñez-Neto said, but that would also be a losing approach, because the new agency would be staffed by the same people who work for ICE now, though he did not say why.
Impeaching Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, as 80 House Democrats want, is also unproductive, he said, because it probably wouldn’t work. “In general I would say I obviously share the frustration and concern with Kristi Noem’s actions as secretary,” he said. But “it is dangerous to resort to” impeachment because “it turns into political theater for the sake of political theater.”
Nuñez-Neto recommended that protesters understand that ICE agents are people, too.
“I think it would help both sides to appreciate the fact that that’s a human being across from you who may or may not want to do the things they’ve been ordered to do. In my long history being in and out of the Department [of Homeland Security], it is very often what makes the news are the terrible things that happen but what doesn’t get reported are the … stories about agents bringing toys into the border patrol station,” he said.
“We’re all human beings, many of them have families, many of them don’t want to be doing what they’ve been directed to do … so it would help us all to lower the temperature a bit. I’m angry too.”
FOUNDED BY FORMER BIDEN SECRETARY OF STATE Antony Blinken in 2017, the firm counts multiple former government officials as employees. The revolving door spins the other way, too, and multiple government agencies have counted WestExec advisers as employees, including many who populated the Biden administration.
WestExec belongs to executive crisis management consultancy Teneo, which bought a majority stake in the firm in June 2022. That was almost exactly a year after Teneo’s founder and CEO, Declan Kelly, lost General Motors and other marquee-name clients following a report in the Financial Times that he had drunkenly groped women without their consent at a charity event. Kelly, also the former special envoy for Northern Ireland, stepped down shortly afterward.
Like WestExec, Teneo also keeps its client list secret. News outlets list Boeing, Coca-Cola, General Electric, the London Stock Exchange, Starbucks, and major U.K. grocery chain Tesco as clients, who as of 2021 paid a basic monthly fee between $250,000 and $1 million, according to the FT. Teneo also counts at least one foreign government as a client; between 2020 and 2024, Saudi Arabia has paid Teneo more than $11 million.
WestExec is expanding its global reach further, and last spring inked a partnership with Brzezinski Global Strategies, a consultancy that advises on Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe. CEO Mark Brzezinski, former U.S. ambassador to Poland and son of Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew, said the deal would allow the firms to “seize the enormous local opportunity in the region.”